Response Essay

Introduction

Writing is a key part of everyday life—whether through texts, emails, social media, or formal documents. Your beliefs about writing, shaped by practice and feedback, influence how you view yourself as a writer and how you approach tasks. For this assignment, you’ll engage with readings by professional and academic writers to reflect on your writing beliefs, examine their practices, and craft a thoughtful response connecting their insights to your experiences.

Genre Definition

A response essay is a written conversation with others’ ideas. As Graff et al. (2012) state, “Academic writing…calls upon writers not simply to express their own ideas, but to do so as a response to what others have said.” This means critically engaging with texts, analyzing connections, and reflecting on how they resonate with your own writing journey.

Your task is to explore one or more key themes from the assigned readings, relate them to your beliefs and practices as a writer, and respond thoughtfully.

First, reflect on your writing beliefs:

What beliefs about writing have you formed in school or elsewhere?
How do these beliefs shape your view of yourself as a writer?
What aspects of writing (e.g., process, challenges, enjoyment) stand out to you?

Next, engage with the readings:

Identify each author’s main claims about writing.
Note their evidence, assumptions, and why their ideas are significant.
Analyze how the texts relate to one another and to your writing experiences.

Explore how you want to respond:

Which ideas do you agree or disagree with? Why?
How do these insights expand or challenge your understanding of writing?
What lessons from these texts could help you grow as a writer?

Only works presented below in the “Suggested Readings” may be used for response.

Organization

Depending on the writing situation, essays may take on slightly different structures. You have some creative license with this form. Keep in mind that the essay must still fulfill genre expectations for responding to others.

Introduction:
- Provide your general reaction to the readings—were they helpful, confusing, insightful, or thought-provoking? Try using one of these strategies:
  - A provocative or interesting question raised by the readings and your response or desire to explore
  - An interesting quotation from the readings and how the quote gave you insight(s)
  - A personal anecdote related to the topic of the reading and what you learned from the experience
- Introduce a key theme or concept from the readings and how it connects to your experience.
- End with a clear thesis statement outlining your response and the points you’ll address. The thesis will offer a guiding structure for your response:
  - theme or topic you are responding to OR
  - the author and article you are responding to, and
  - the main points you will be making in response.
Body:
- Connect Ideas: Summarize relevant points from the readings, cite the authors, and relate their ideas to your experiences.
- Reflect: Share specific writing experiences that connect to the readings. Highlight challenges, growth, or changes in perspective.
- Discuss how the authors’ insights influence your approach to writing or challenge unhelpful habits.
- Use topic sentences and logical organization to guide readers through your response.
Conclusion:
- Revisit your initial reaction to the readings and summarize what you’ve learned.
- Reflect on any “aha” moments or insights gained during the process.
- Close with a memorable takeaway about your evolving writing practice.

Some tips:

Use examples from the readings to support your ideas and cite them properly.
Consider opening with a thought-provoking question, quote, or anecdote.
Stay focused on ethical and constructive communication—use the essay as a chance to explore growth, not dwell on frustrations.

Length & Formatting

Essays should be approximately 750 words (no more than 1000 words; more is not necessarily better), 3 pages. A minimum of 1, maximum of 2 sources may be used. MLA style should guide formatting and citations.

Quantity does not equal quality. Writing must demonstrate clearly connected ideas and should be in your own voice.

Evaluation & Assessment

The competencies addressed in this unit include

Learn and use key rhetorical concepts
Practice writing in a variety of genres
Read a diverse range of texts, attending to the interplay of relationships
Apply critical reading skills
Draw upon strategies to compose texts that synthesize the writer's ideas with the voices of others

Categories of assessment will measure the proficiency of the submission for publication based on the following criteria:

Rhetorical Situation
Narrative Experience
Responsive Synthesis
Voice: Style & Tone
Citations & Articulation

See LMS for details on specific scoring measures.

Writing Process

Weeks 1 & 2

Begin by reading. (Suggested readings for this project are at the end of the assignment.) Getting a “working knowledge” of a subject means doing a lot of reading on the topic by scholars who are experts in the field. Besides, reading good writing will give you models for the structures of your own writing stories. For this assignment, you will be required to read a number of pre-selected texts. From these texts, you can begin to choose which readings and themes you want to respond to for your major writing assignment.

Read critically. Use critical reading strategies to draw ideas from the reading. Potential strategies for keeping track of ideas include

Taking notes to capture key or interesting points
Asking questions about the text
Double-entry journals or graphic organizers
Annotating the text in the margins
Highlighting and underlining key passages

Be careful not to overwrite the text; collect the most interesting or thought-provoking elements.

Reflect on the reading. I suggest writing a 5 minute “freewrite” after each reading to get down your initial impressions and responses. *Did you know, this is actually part of doing the writing?

Play the doubting and believing game. By challenging what you didn’t agree with and identifying common ground, you can start exploring where your writing practices intersect with those of the authors and identify some areas of difference or similarity. Reading and writing for inquiry help writers tease out ideas. These will be the building blocks of your essay.

Week 3

Building on notes from the reading, start thinking about how your own beliefs and experiences with writing relate to what you have read. How would you respond to one of the authors or one of the ideas about writing?

Sketch out your ideas.

What will your theme be?
What main points will you focus on to draw out your theme?
How will you support your main points with evidence from the readings?
How will you show connections or departures between your writing experience and those of experienced writers?

Compose a draft of your essay in preparation for peer review. Include narrative details of your own writing experience in response to readings from other writers.

Week 4

Peer Review, Revision, & Publication

Once you complete a draft, you will share your writing with your peers. You will also have the opportunity to review your peers’ work. Consider how your peers have constructed their essays and what you can learn from their writing style. Also, give your peers critical feedback.

Revision means rethinking what you wrote. As you will read in Sommers' text, minor edits are not what I mean by revision. I want you to take a close look at your work and consider both global and small scale revisions before proofreading for publication (submission).

In this context, the publication is your draft submission. Publications are not always final drafts. Some writers go back to their writing and rework, refine, and sometimes even resubmit extensive revisions as an updated revision or new edition. While you don’t have the option to submit a revised edition after you have published your work for this assignment, I want you to have the experience of submitting your work in pre-press condition.

Works Cited

Ballenger, Bruce. The Curious Writer, concise 5th ed., Pearson, 2017.

Elbow, Peter. Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. 2nd ed. NY: Oxford UP, 1998.

Graff, Gerald, Cathy Birkenstein, & Russel Durst. They Say I Say. 2nd ed., W. W. Norton, 2012.

Macleod, Shawn."Paragraph Structure." Smrt English, https://youtu.be/NLzKqujmdGk.

"Response Paper" Thompson Writing Program, Duke, https://twp.duke.edu/sites/twp.duke.edu/files/file-attachments/response-paper.original.pdf

Wilhoit, Stephen. A Brief Guide to Writing from Readings. Pearson, 2016.