While templates for academic writing, like those offered in the popular textbook "They Say/I Say," have been embraced by some, others still question the extent to which an emphasis on form comes at the expense of substance. But ancient rhetoricians offer a theory of rhetoric that unites style and substance, and Jeanne Fahnestock's modern work on rhetorical figures of speech highlights the ways in which syntactical patterns of arrangement and style connect to inferential patterns of reasoning. Drawing on this scholarship, I suggest that using templates based on the rhetorical figure of "antithesis" and its arrangement of contrasting "cola" not only provides students with language that helps them get started in their writing (as templates are designed to do) but also supports their processes of invention.