"They say, I say" post #1

Exercise 1 :

The term "smoking" tends to be synonymous with "relaxation" in some people's minds. They see smoking as a harmless habit used to relieve stress and lose weight. However, some people choose to smoke because they believe it looks "cool" and want to be accepted. On the contrary, smoking is very addictive, unhealthy, and can cause cancer and other life threatening diseases. For the truth is that it does not look cool or relieve stress. It causes people to age quicker, smell like smoke, turn their teeth yellow, and turn their lungs black. In this essay, then, closely examining a smoker with a non smoker, I can show the audience how harmful smoking actually is and what it can do to your body.

Exercise 2:

In the introduction to "They Say / I Say": The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein provide templates designed to help students to be creative. Specifically, Graff and Birkenstein argue that the types of writing templates they offer help students improve the creativity in their writing. As the authors themselves put it, the templates "will actually help your writing become more original and creative, not less." Although some people believe templates will cause everyone's writing to be similar, Graff and Birkenstein insist that it is actually just a tool to outline your work. In sum, their view is that your creativity will be improved if you use these templates as a skeleton to start your assignment.

I agree with Graff and Birkenstein; in my view, the types of templates that the authors recommend give me a solid base to begin from. For instance, this assignment seems much simpler since we have somewhere to go from. In addition, while reading other students' essays where they followed the same topic as I did, ours ended up very different from each other. Some might object, of course, on the grounds that they enjoyed free writing instead of being told how to write. Yet I would argue that by using these templates, our essays are much more organized, yet still creative in their own ways. Overall, then I believe Graff and Birkenstein's opinions are true--an important part to make given hile writing an essay.