Blog #19

In They Say/I Say, I decided to read chapter nine which discusses how to write academic papers without losing your voice. The chapter states that “academic writing is often at its best when it combines what we call ‘everyday speak’ and ‘academic speak’ (Graff and Birkenstein 119). It is essential that academic language is used in order to accurately describe the topic being written about. Though including parts of your everyday voice has the power to make your paper more accessible to readers as it adds tone to it, making them able to understand your thoughts and have a more precise view about your position on a certain topic. Blending academic language and with your voice enables you to reinterpret challenging subjects, demonstrating that you are able to understand the topic you are writing about by putting it into your own words.

This has always been one of my struggles when I am writing. I focus too much on the evidence that I often forget to relate it back to my own thoughts and incorporate my opinion within my paper. This is the current case with the multimodal paper I am writing right now. I included facts from three different articles that support how art has the power to improve access to education around the world, but I neglected to include my own thoughts about the impact that art has on this problem. When revising my paper, I plan to combine the academic language I currently have with my own everyday language, using inspiration from some of the templates in the chapter including “Essentially, X argues___.” and “Plainly put,___” (Graff and Birkenstein 121). Furthermore, the multimodal elements that I include will help translate my opinion to the readers, an aspect that was suggested to me by my peers. Adding these changes within my paper will assist the readers in building a better understanding of my views about the power art has in improving access to education.