The ICE Method and They Say, I Say Templates

• In this unit, we'll discuss the I.C.E. Method and introduce the They Say, I Say Templates. You won't be able to correctly and completely integrate quotes or paraphrased material from your sources until you've mastered the I.C.E. technique, The They Say, I Say Templates will prove very helpful towards this goal.

• In this presentation, I combine a discussion of the I.C.E. Method and introduce the They Say, I Say Templates. You won't be able to correctly and completely integrate quotes or paraphrased material from your sources until you've mastered the I.C.E. technique, The They Say, I Say Templates will prove very helpful towards this goal.

• For those who prefer to read the slides and presentation transcript, click HERE for the original PowerPoint and notes.

The They Say, I Say Templates

• Successful academic writing involves presenting both your sources’ ideas and your own ideas fairly and effectively to your readers. According to Graff and Birkenstein, authors of They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, to do so, you should engage in “a conversation about ideas” in which you react critically to your sources (ix). Graff and Birkenstein’s templates may help you to have this conversation in a reader-friendly fashion, so that your thesis, supporting evidence, opposing evidence, and conclusions are clear.

• While you don’t want to adopt these templates mindlessly, the templates do provide sensible language for engaging in academic conversations, and we all benefit from adopting good language for our own purposes. Here is a color document that I have adapted from their text. Remember, these forms still require proper citations so readers know who “they” are.

Integrating Evidence Effectively

• Let’s say you’ve identified some good evidence for an argument in your paper. You’ve already decided to keep the evidence as a direct quote or to paraphrase the information you found. Or maybe your evidence is a table or graph. But what’s the next step? Where should the quotation, paraphrase, or other evidence go in the paragraph? And how do you include it without everything looking choppy, or even worse, confusing?

• Integrating evidence smoothly into your writing requires a few standard tools plus some critical thinking. You can think of the process in three stages: signaling, situating, and synthesizing.

• Click HERE to learn more about integrating evidence into your papers effectively.

• This video outlines how to effectively add textual evidence to an essay about a piece of writing that uses MLA format. John Steinbeck's Of Mice & Men is utilized as an example subject. The structure includes Context, Lead-In, Quotation, In-Text Citation, and Explanation.