what does response essay mean

How to Write a Personal Response Essay

How to Write a 200 Word Biography

Personal opinion writing is something that you’ve been doing since you started writing in elementary school. Who knows your opinion better than you? You may think writing a personal response essay will be pretty easy, but in reality, writing a personal response paper requires a great deal of critical thinking and introspection.

What Is a Personal Response Essay?

A personal response essay is a type of essay that asks students to think critically about a piece of writing (or sometimes another form of media like a movie, television show or article) and respond based on a critical analysis of the writing’s content in comparison to their own beliefs and personal experiences. A personal response essay is not a blow-off, fluff assignment. On the contrary, it asks students to dig deep and justify their personal beliefs and feelings in terms of concrete description, logic, philosophy and reasoning.

An excellent personal essay won't only make clear the writer’s personal beliefs, it will also justify their feelings about a piece of writing or other media by using analysis of direct quotations and examples from the response text. Because personal response essays require so much critical thinking and analysis, a well-prepared student will come at the essay as they would any research paper. Preparation, close reading, outlining and revision are all key steps to writing a well-rounded response.

Do a Pre-Reading Brainstorm

Even before you begin reading, you can start thinking critically about the text. Take out a piece of paper and jot down your preconceived notions before you get started. For example, you may have heard of the text before. It could be a short story that was made into movie or maybe your best friend read it last semester and told you all about it. If you’re feeling particularly organized, you can use the type of notes called KWL. These letters stand for what you K now, what you W ant to know and what you will L earn after you read the text. If you’ve already heard about the text before you started to read it, make a list of things you already think you know. You might not be right on every idea, but the beauty of KWL notes is that you don’t have to go back and erase what you got wrong just to make room for new ideas. Being able to compare your preconceived notions with what you’ve learned will help you form a more thorough response in your paper.

If you haven’t heard of the text before, do a pre-reading exercise. Start with the title and write about what you think it means. Some essays have strange titles, like David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster.” If your professor assigned something with an interesting title like that, you’ll have plenty to write about. If the title is more staid, you can still use it to make predictions. Ask yourself, just by reading the title, what do I think this text will be about?

After interrogating the title, glance over the rest of the story. Is there anything about the text that stands out to you, such as italics, bold words or subheadings? Consider them like you did the title. What do you think the story will include based on these characteristics of the text?

Read the Response Text

Now that you’ve finished brainstorming, read the text carefully. Don’t worry about annotation or taking notes just yet. Focus on reading for comprehension. But if you see something you don’t want to forget, like a paragraph that gives you a strong feeling or a particularly witty turn of phrase, underline it and make a note in the margin. You can circle back to these notes while you're doing a complete annotation.

Even though you’re going to read this text again, it's important to write down your first impressions. Your thoughts may change after careful analysis, but that doesn’t mean your initial ideas aren't valid. Indeed, one effective way to write a personal response essay is to delineate the changes in your thoughts about a single subject over time. For example, if you know you're going to read an essay about refugees and your initial idea was that your country shouldn't be as lenient on immigration even for those seeking asylum, the first read of the response text might not change your mind. After a close reading, you might better understand the subject matter and implications, and so, if the text then changed your mind, that would make for a significant personal response. In other words, make sure that you write down your opinions at every stage of the reading, planning and writing process. Your thoughts are the main focus of a personal response essay, so be very careful that you record them all.

Reread and Annotate the Response Text

After you record your initial reaction, reread the text. Use highlighters to select parts of the text that you'd like to go back to or quote. Write your analysis in pen in the margins. Unlike with many English papers, your analysis won't focus on literary devices like symbolism unless those devices affect you profoundly or cause you to think. Since the focus is on your thoughts, you could home in on rhetoric, especially if particular rhetorical devices in the text are effective at changing your mind. For example, if you're reading an essay written by a refugee, you might find their first-person description of fleeing their country quite moving. Or, perhaps you'll be more swayed by their use of statistics and logic. Remember that the essay depends on what you think and feel. Find portions of the text that back up those thoughts and feelings.

Make an Outline

Effective annotation will make constructing your outline easier. Look back over your annotated text and select the portions that you'd like to include in your essay. Organize these thoughts into list-like notations that you'll later expand into paragraphs. Arrange them in sections that include their main idea, your thoughts on that idea and the evidence from the text that you’re commenting on. Look back at your pre-writes and your first impressions. Incorporate these ideas into the logical flow of your thoughts.

When you’re writing the actual paper, your life will be much easier if you write down the quotations verbatim in your outline. Put quotation marks around them and make note of the citation. That way, when you’re writing, you only need to look back at your outline and you won’t waste time continually going back to the text.

Remember to construct an outline that corresponds with the desired length of your paper. If you've been assigned a simple five-paragraph essay, create an outline with the introduction, three body paragraphs and a conclusion. This form, however, won't be helpful if you have to write a longer paper. In that case, organize your ideas into subheadings and expand those into paragraphs. In the planning stage, it's better to have more ideas than fewer. Plan more than you think you'll need. If you reach the required length while you’re writing and still have more ideas, determine if your paper will make sense without them. There's no need to overwrite if you've already expressed your ideas efficiently.

Write Your Response

If you’ve already done a thorough job outlining your paper, the step of actually writing it will be one of the least arduous parts of the whole process. Go through your outline and expand on your thoughts. The most challenging part of this will be linking your thoughts in a logical flow. A lot of writers struggle with this part. The key is to understand each paragraph as a separate idea. Which smaller idea could act as a stepping stone and bridge the gap between them? Compose a sentence or two about these ideas and include them at the end and beginning of the paragraphs to act as linking sentences.

While you’re writing, make sure you're answering your writing prompt. You may have been given instructions that asked for certain details other than just your opinions and beliefs based on the text. Make sure you include everything that your teacher has asked for.

Try to write well using the active voice and descriptive language as needed. Spelling, punctuation and grammar are also vital parts to pay attention to, but if you get nervous while you’re forming your first draft, don’t let shooting for perfection make you nervous. It’s better to get the first draft out and have it be full of mistakes than to write nothing. Do your best when writing this first draft. If you make mistakes, you can fix them later.

Editing and Revision

Even most brilliant writers need editors. You do, too. Don’t fall into the easy trap of submitting your first draft to your teacher. Instead, there are a few additional steps you need to take before you're done.

First, read your essay over. Does the logic flow? Do all of your ideas have complete elaboration? Put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Does what you've written make sense to someone who isn’t you? Using this kind of interrogation technique, fill in missing pieces of logic and elaboration in your essay. Don’t start proofreading before you do this. If you're adding a lot more content, you'll have to start the proofreading process over or else risk missing things.

After you've made all the additions you think you need, it's now time to proofread. If you know you struggle with a certain type of grammar, using commas for instance, pay extra attention to those details.

Once your essay is as complete as you can make it, ask a peer, parent or teacher to read it over and tell you how you might improve it. Make sure you choose someone who will give you a thoughtful critique, not someone who will tell you your essay is perfect. If you have time, ask more than one person to read and comment on your essay. The more differing opinions you can get on your writing, the more you'll be able to improve it.

Using the comments they've made, revise your paper. This could mean adding and elaborating. This could also mean polishing your grammar and syntax. Remember, you don’t have to change your work to suit everyone’s opinions. That's why it's important to get more than one person to read your essay. You're allowed to disagree.

Finally, before submitting your paper, make sure that it's formatted as required by your teacher. For longer papers, this means using a cover page. Most formatting requires that your name and the page number be on every page. Be sure to follow the guidelines, and if you need to, look on the internet for examples. This is a simple thing to lose points for, so be careful. If you’re still struggling, ask your teacher for a personal response example.

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Rebecca Renner is a teacher and freelance writer from Daytona Beach, Florida. Her byline has appeared in the Washington Post, New York Magazine, Glamour and elsewhere.

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How to write response essay: guidelines from expert team.

January 31, 2022

Response writing can be tricky, but if you follow our step-by-step guide, you’ll have no trouble coming up with a great one! We will walk you through exactly how to write a response paragraph, how to properly structure it, and even give you some helpful tips to make your essay shine!

So, let’s get writing!

Table Of Contents

What is a response essay, structure of a response essay, steps to write a good response essay, 5 key features needed in a response essay, tips to write a stellar response essay, response essay example.

First things first – what exactly is a response essay? A response essay is a type of writing that allows the writer to respond to a piece of work. It can be a text, image, or event. It’s essentially a reaction paper – you’re giving your thoughts and feelings about whatever it is you’re responding to.

Response essays allow you to freely communicate your thoughts and feelings about any topic. Unlike summary essays where you just restate what you read, response essays require you to genuinely understand the content and context of the work you’re assigned.

Once you have a strong grasp of the subject material, you have to concisely put forth your insights, opinions, and analysis.

Now that you know what a response essay is, it’s time to learn how to structure one. A good response essay follows a specific format, which allows your ideas to be conveyed clearly and concisely.

Here’s the basic essay response format :

• Introduction
• Summary Of The Work
• Reaction, Response, and Analysis

Let’s take a closer look at each of these elements that form the response paper format.

• Introduction Your introduction should introduce the work that you’re responding to and mention the name of the author. You should also include your thesis statement in this section – this is your position on the subject matter. Overall, this part should be about 1-2 paragraphs long and it should keep the reader interested to read the rest of the response paper.

For example : “Should America atone for its past sins against black people? This is the question raised by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his powerful article ‘The Case For Reparations’. The author strongly believes that America should make reparations to the African-American community, and after much contemplation, I wholeheartedly agree with him”.

• Summary Of The Work In your summary, you want to give a general overview of the content without giving away too much. You’ll highlight the main points of the work, provide direct quotations, and keep the writing objective and factual.

For example : “Ta-Nehisi Coates makes many compelling arguments for why America should make reparations to the African-American community. He cites statistics, historical evidence, and personal stories to support his position. According to him, “To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting American’s origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte.”.

• Reaction, Response, and Analysis In this section, you’ll want to go into detail about your reaction to the work. What did you like or dislike? What were your thoughts and feelings? Be sure to back up your claims with evidence from the text.

For example : “I found Coates’ argument to be very convincing. He makes a strong case for reparations by providing ample evidence to support his position. I was also moved by his personal stories about the impact of slavery on African-Americans today. His writing is powerful and emotional, and it made me think about America’s history in a new light”.

Many students struggle with writing a good response essay simply because they’re confused about how to write response essay, where to begin, how to begin, and what to do next. Let’s take a look at the step-by-step process of writing a fabulous response paper that is sure to get the attention of your teachers and professors.

• Step 1 – Read and Understand the Work Before you can write a good response essay, you first need to read and understand the work that you’re responding to. Whether it’s a book, movie, article, or poem, the quality of your response paper is directly proportional to how well you’ve understood the source material. Take notes as you read and highlight important passages so that you can refer back to them later. This is an important step in learning how to start a response essay.
• Step 2 – Brainstorm Your Ideas Once you’ve read and understood the work, it’s time to brainstorm your ideas. This is the part of the process where you let your thoughts flow freely and write down any and all responses that come to mind. Don’t worry about making sense or sorting them out yet – just get everything down on paper.
• Step 3 – Write Your Thesis Statement Your thesis statement is your position on the subject matter – it should be clear, concise, and easy to understand. This is what you’ll be arguing for or against in your essay. Don’t be afraid to genuinely put forth your opinion, whether it’s positive or negative.
• Step 4 – Support Your Thesis with Evidence Now it’s time to support your thesis statement with evidence from the text. Quote directly from the work and provide a brief explanation of how it supports your argument. Don’t forget to cite your sources! The summary of the work and your personal opinion on the matter will form the core content of your paper.
• Step 5 – Write a Conclusion Once you’ve finished arguing for your position, it’s time to write a conclusion. Restate your thesis and summarize your main points. You may also want to leave readers with something to think about or a call to action. A solid conclusion can sometimes make all the difference between a great response essay and a mediocre one!

By following these steps, you’ll be able to write some of the best response essays that are well-organized, informative, and persuasive. All it takes is a little time and practice! On the contrary, you can choose buying custom college papers and be free of this assignment.

When writing a response essay, there are certain key features that you need to keep in mind. Whether it’s for school, college, or university, these five features will make your response essay unique and interesting.

• Summarizing – This is probably the most important feature of writing a response essay. You need to be able to summarize the work succinctly, highlighting the most important points without giving away too much of the plot or story.
• Paraphrasing/Quoting – In order to support your argument, you’ll need to quote and paraphrase the work extensively. Make sure that you always credit your sources!
• Organization – Your essay should be well-organized and easy to follow. Start with a strong introduction, then move on to your main points. Wrap things up with a conclusion that reiterates your position. No professor likes reading a haphazardly put-together essay!
• Transitions – To keep your essay cohesive, you’ll need to use strong transitions and connecting words between paragraphs. This way, the reader can move between different portions of your writing (e.g. Introduction > Summary > Thesis > Conclusion) without losing interest.
• Argumentation – Last but not least, your essay needs to be filled with strong argumentation. Make sure to back up your points with evidence from the text, and don’t be afraid to state your opinion openly. This is what will set your response essay apart from the rest!

We’ll share with you a few of our tried and tested essay writing tips that will masterfully elevate your response essay.

• Take your time and read the source material carefully.
• Write a strong thesis statement that reflects your position on the matter.
• When stating definitive opinions, cite instances from the text to strengthen your stand.
• Argument your points persuasively and with conviction.
• Proofread your essay for errors such as grammar, language, punctuation, and spelling.
• Have someone else, like a trusted friend or teacher, read it over for you as well – fresh eyes can sometimes catch mistakes that you’ve missed.
• Use the help of a reliable paper writing service to assist you in the process.

Now that you’ve read all our instructions, there’s only one thing left to do. You have a chance to ged extended response essay sample and see all our tips in practice.

Response Paper In his article “The Militarization of the Police”, James Bouie argues that recent traegy in Ferguson is only one symptom of the broad problem of increasing police militarization in the USA. The purpose of the author is to bring this question into light and warn American citizens about the danger it entails for the whole society, with a special emphasis being placed on racial minorities. Bouie addresses the general public who are concerned with political and social tendencies in the US. The author begins his article with discussion of the photographs from Ferguson demonstration, pointing out the signs of inadequate aggression of the police toward the citizens. He puts the Ferguson tragedy in the context of increasing militarization of the US police force, which he believes to be one of the major problems of the American society. Bouie asserts that this process began with the war on drugs in the 1980s and intensified after the 9/11 attacks and the wars in the Middle East. He estimates that the value of military hardware owned by U.S. police agencies increased at 450 times from 1990 to 2013, despite the falling crime rates. Bouie also discusses the issue of increased SWAT deployment, which is disproportionately utilized in black and Latino neighborhoods. The conclusion the author draws is that the availability of heavy military weapons and a long-standing tradition of punitive policing toward racial minorities are the major factors that are likely to cause repressive reactions of the police. The Ferguson tragedy has recently riveted the attention of the whole U.S. population. While we may lament the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, it is important to view these events in the broader context of police misconduct, as the author does it. Despite numerous changes and advancements in law enforcement over the last decade, such as community policing and recruiting more officers from racial minorities, the society is still staunchly opposed to the police force, and the negative sentiment has predictably grown after the Ferguson unrest. The frequent SWAT raids are definitely an overreaction, given that they are mostly deployed for low-level offenses, such as drug use. Repressive and punitive actions with the disproportionate targeting of racial minorities suggest that positive changes in the police were of purely decorative nature and were not effective to eradicate stereotypes, prejudices and aggression from the mind of law enforcement officers. While the author does not explore this perspective in detail, the increasing militarization of the police is often viewed as a logical consequence of the militarization of the whole US politics, which is obsessed with identifying and eliminating national enemies. Incessant employment of war rhetoric by the officials has the power to alter the mindset of the whole society, not only police officers. The article provides a comprehensive account of the author’s opinion. No doubts arise as to the appropriateness of his observations, largely because they are aligned with the common social reaction to Ferguson tragedy. However, the author does not explore any potential solutions to the problem, thus leaving this question open for the readers to consider. Another overlooked issue, which may interest the readers, is how the situation in the USA compares to other developed countries and what policies they implement to prevent the overreaction of police force. The author has achieved the purpose of persuading his readers that events in Ferguson are linked to a broader social problem, as his arguments appeal to the common sense and show clear causality between acquisition of military equipment and overreaction to offenses and unrest. The author made his article more persuading by referring to Ferguson photographs, statistics and authoritative specialists to support his argument.

Want Someone To Write An Essay For You?

We hope this guide has taught you everything you need to know about how to write a strong response essay. Keep these key points in mind, and you’re guaranteed to produce a top-notch paper! If you want additional advice on how to write a response paper, simply hire someone to write an essay . Our team of professional, educated academic writers will write high-quality papers and essays that will get you in the good books of any of your teachers! It’s fast, affordable, and always 100% original. You won’t be disappointed! Good luck with all of your future academic endeavours!

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24 How do I Write a Response Essay?

Pre-writing steps:

• Read the essay prompt carefully.
• Activate schema

Actively read the assigned article.

Analyze the article to determine the rhetorical situation.

• Consider your own thoughts about the article.
• Decide how you want to respond.

Conference #1

Structure your essay.

• Outline the essay you want to write.

Draft a working thesis.

Drafting the essay:

Write a summary of the article as your introduction.

Write 3 or more body paragraphs in response to the article.

Review your draft so far.

Write the conclusion to summarize your thoughts.

Revising steps:

Peer review

Conference #2

• Revise your essay.
• Proofread your essay.

—————————————–

Read the essay prompt carefully

• Highlight or note the important points
• Ask questions for any part that isn’t clear to you.
• Retrieve your assigned article.

Activate schema.

• Skim and scan the article to identify the topic and the author(s).  Look for subtitles and boldly printed words.  Read the author’s bio which is often located at the beginning or at the end of the article.  Identify the publication.  Read the first sentence of each paragraph.  Ask yourself, “Am I familiar with this topic?” This will help you to activate your schema.
• identify the key points and ideas
• make note of where you agree or disagree
• highlight impactful sentences to quote the author later
• paraphrase the author’s words
• summarize the article
• What is the message?
• What is the context?
• Who is the author?
• What is the author’s purpose?
• What is the structure of the text?
• Who is the audience?

Consider your own thoughts about the author and their message.

• What do I think about this topic?
• Is this author trustworthy?
• Is the article written to inform or persuade me?
• If it is written to persuade, on which points do I agree or disagree?
• Is the author biased?
• Does the article have an objective or subjective tone?
• What did I like or dislike about what the author has written in this article?
• What made the most sense to me? What was confusing about this article?

Decide how to respond.

There are several ways in which to respond to an article.  You may choose a type of response from the following list:

• Before/After- Discuss your thoughts about this topic before you read the article, then explain what you learned from the article using evidence from the text.
• Persuasion- Discuss which parts of the articles you found convincing and/or which parts of the article you did not find convincing.
• Agreement or Disagreement- Discuss an idea that the author presented to which you agree or disagree. If there were two points of view that were presented, explain which one you agree with and explain why.
• Affect- Explain the emotional effect that the article had on you. Explain why you responded that way including your own background and your own thoughts/ experiences.
• Association- Share something from the article that is similar to your own experience.  Or relate the information to a different article that you have read before this article.
• Most students wait until they have a draft, but seriously, this is the best time to talk to a writing tutor about your project.
• HCC has several options for free tutoring. Best choice: after class, drop in at the Composition and Learning Center (CLC) in Duncan Hall 210. This is staffed by current HCC English professors, and you can talk to one for 10-20 minutes about your assignment and your ideas for your topic, and what to include in your essay.
• There are also drop-in tutors at the Learning Assistance Center (LAC) in RCF 340.
• an introduction- a summary paragraph of the article
• a response- 3 or more body paragraphs responding to the author
• a conclusion- a concluding paragraph summing up your thoughts.

Outline the essay your want to write.

• Use the structure of the response essay to determine the order of each paragraph.  Gather your notes. Review the way you chose to respond.   Write a main idea statement for each paragraph of your essay.  Then, list (using bullet points) the details that you want to include under each main idea statement. You can also list relevant quotes from the article that support your ideas.
• A thesis includes your topic and what you are going to say about this topic.
• A thesis always has two parts: a topic AND something important about this topic that your essay is going to discuss.
• A thesis is NEVER a question.
• Use your notes and the rhetorical situation of the article to write a summary.  Begin with an introductory sentence that introduces the publisher, author, topic, purpose, and the main idea of the article.
• Next, write a few sentences to describe the key points the author made to support the main idea.
• End your summary with your thesis.
• During your pre-writing, you decided how you might want to respond to the article.  Use your outline to draft your body paragraphs.  Use your synthesis skills to corporate relevant quotes from the article into paragraphs to support your ideas.
• Is your summary of the article concise, objective, and accurate?
• Do your body paragraphs respond to the article?
• Do you have a main idea for each of the body paragraphs?
• Do the sentences in each paragraph support each main idea?
• This question is extremely important.  If you find that you did not respond to the article in the way you had originally planned, revise your thesis.
• End your essay by summarizing the main points you shared in your body paragraphs.
• A classmate; a friend; a relative: ask someone to read over your work. Note their questions as they read.
• At the very least, read your essay aloud to yourself, stopping when you get tripped up in words or sentences. Consider how to make these rough spots easier to read.
• Schedule a conference with your instructor, or drop in on their student/office hours, or send them a Zoom request to talk about any questions you have about your draft.
• You can also drop in at the CLC in DH210 or LAC in RCF 340 to have a conference with a tutor.

Revise your essay

• Look at your outline: have you forgotten anything?
• Do a paragraph outline of just main idea sentences for each paragraph: you’ll have a 5-7 sentence summary of your whole essay.

Proofread your essay

• take on an objective tone?
•  introduce the article properly?
• capture the main point of the article?
• respond to the article?
• capture your thoughts and opinions?
• begin with a main idea statement followed by detail?
• include quotes from the article?
• concisely review your thoughts about the article?
• Major grammar errors include run-on sentences, comma splices, and sentence fragments.
• You are responsible for running Grammarly or another grammar/spellcheck before your essay is submitted.
• Your instructors want to focus on improving your WRITING—not technical errors that machines can catch easily.
• Use Modern Language Association (MLA) guidelines for formatting your academic essay and for any in-text citations or a Works Cited page.

College Reading & Writing: A Handbook for ENGL- 090/095 Students Copyright © by Yvonne Kane; Krista O'Brien; and Angela Wood. All Rights Reserved.

Share This Book

Consider a sampling of the things we might be asked to respond to--an individual event, experience, or feeling; a series of events, experiences, or feelings; a person or several persons; objects, attitudes, trends, art, film, literature, historical artifact, cultural practice-and this is just a beginning. All of these, for purposes of our discussion here, can be thought of as "texts" to be responded to and all of them can provide occasion for the writing of a response essay.

Consider the range of texts that might be grounds for a response assignment, and remember, this is just a sampling.

Primary documents from any period, a moment from history, the biography of an historical figure, an artifact, an autobiography.

Literature and Art

A novel, short story, poem, essay, book, a passage from any piece of literature, a book review, literary criticism, a specialized lexicon, biography, autobiography; any art object, any criticism of an art object, a series of objects by an individual artist.

Film or Theater

A feature-length film, a full theater production, a one-woman show, a commercial advertisement, a clip, an individual performance within film or theater, stage features: scenery, lighting, costuming, etc.

A case study, an observation of a subject, an interview with a subject, a testing procedure, a developmental model, a treatment model, developmental transitions, group practices, individual practices, a statistical analysis.

A cultural practice or tradition, cultural norms or taboos, a case study, an ethnography, a rite of passage, funereal or baptismal practices-rituals, games and play, group processes.

Political Science

A Supreme Court ruling, a political speech, a demonstration, role of the media in public life, definitions in constitutional issues such as the definitions of "obscenity" and "pornography".

Lab report, household experiment, biography of a scientist, history of a scientific notion, lay writings on technical topics, funding sources for research, experimental procedures, science and culture interface/overlap, breakthroughs and slowdowns, research methodologies, professional/technical journal articles on groundbreaking research, data.

Am I Qualified to Respond?

Responses allow writers, even novice writers, the opportunity to do original thinking and writing. In fact, the writing of academic responses is one way to enter the conversation of the academic community. Arguably, it is an obligatory part of being a college student.

Goals of Academic Response

The goal of dialogue in academe, of responses and responses to the responses, is less about ratification, or confirmation of what we already know and more about risk-taking, or what is sometimes called "reading against the grain" or functioning as the "loyal opposition." Implicit here is the assumption that we learn by keeping an open and enlarging mind, and that at the same time we acknowledge the incomplete nature of each of our perspectives. We do the best we can at any given time, with the material and resources available to us, and the way we respond today may differ from the way we respond tomorrow.

Further, because no two people are alike, neither are their ways of responding to "texts." Yet the power to interpret belongs to everyone. So even though we may not feel qualified to respond to a text, may not believe we possess sufficient background or expertise on a topic, nevertheless we find ourselves capable of responding to it and, in fact, often are required to do so.

Becoming Informed and Staying That Way

It has always been challenging to become informed, but as information proliferates and knowledge grows more complex and specialized, it becomes increasingly difficult to stay informed. Therefore, the struggle you are engaged today as a novice is not so much different than the struggle you'll be engaged in throughout your professional career.

Do not despair! More to the point, do not allow your incomplete grasp of all aspects of a situation (or of a text) to deter you from entering the conversation or providing your own best response at any given time.

In a sense, we are all in the same boat, even your professors--and increasingly so given the rapid expansion of knowledge and its transmittal in the Information Age. Embrace your membership in this community-college--which supports an evolution or development of response from basic to sophisticated; further, continue to approach your responses with the candor and openness of the novitiate and you'll go far in academe. You probably are that novice right now, and yet you are simultaneously an important voice whose point of view is valued. As a novice, you do well to approach your role as did the villagers of Ballybran, who entered the conversation out of desire and necessity and then busied to make themselves knowledgeable. Then, as you learn more about subjects, approach your knowledge with the same fresh approach as the learned Stanford anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who, in studying the villagers of Ballybran, was unafraid to look at her own area of expertise with fresh eyes. That is the nature of academic inquiry when it is functioning well.

Take Courage From an Example: The Anthropologist and the Ballybrans

Stanford anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, went to a village in western Ireland, Ballybran, to study the relationship there between longstanding social customs and mental illness. Scheper-Hughes lived amongst the Ballybrans, engaging in a kind of study known as ethnography. As a result of her study, some of the inhabitants of the village became angry about the way Scheper-Hughes depicted them. They spoke out about it, even argued about it. Others began to examine some of the complicated problems of their community and started discussing them. In any case, the inhabitants of this village were changed by having been studied, and they looked at their circumstances with fresh eyes, with a perspective gained from having a foreign observer in their midst.

Similarly, because Scheper-Hughes was concerned about the way her new friends in the village became bitter about her findings, she reexamined the purposes and methods of her field. She began to challenge some of anthropology's ethical obligations to the people it studies.

Thus, both the villagers and the visiting expert were changed; they learned from each other. Further, there can be little doubt that both were qualified to respond to the study, and they did so, though in quite different ways.

Reading to Respond: Encountering the Text

In preparing to respond there's no substitute for coming face-to-face with the text you'll be responding to and opening yourself up to it fully. Don't be one of those people who "reads around" the text, reading criticism of the text but never quite getting to the text itself. Eventually you may want to look at some of the secondary sources, the criticism, but start with the primary text. Immerse yourself in it. Know it, inside and out. Think of "reading" the text, regardless of whether it's a written text or a piece of art or a film or an historical artifact. Resolve from the beginning that this is going to take some time.

Survey or Preview the Text

Try to begin your encounter with the text by surveying or previewing it, which is to say, coming at it with a wide-angle lens, looking it over in its entirety, and activating your schema (your storehouse of accumulated knowledge and experience). Think of this encounter as similar to the strategy you take when downhill skiing at a new location, when shopping at a new mall, or when visiting a city for the first time. You want to get the lay of the land, know what you're getting into before you take a lift at the ski resort, before buying shoes at the mall, or before trying to traverse the city. You could waste precious time taking a lift to slopes you've no interest in; you could spend too much money by not doing comparison shopping; and you could get lost in traffic if you don't know where you're going. A little time up front can save you a lot of time over the long haul, so learn to get the broad view of a text before you try to read, analyze, and respond to it, and know that taking a look at your text this way is one of the most valuable skills you can learn as a writer, as a reader, and as a life-long learner.

Formulate Questions About the Text

Based upon your initial survey and upon the response assignment you've been given, develop questions that are pertinent to the reading you are about to do. These questions should help you focus and stay active during your reading. Use your predictive capabilities to forecast what the text will say and the questions you will have. Think more in terms of "Why" questions than "What" questions. Think of the "connective tissue" of the text, the margins, the movements from point to point, or those areas where relationships among ideas are explored, exceptions taken, distinctions made, and then ask how the text proceeds from point to point, paying particular attention to these boundary areas.

Use Prediction

When an active reader prepares to read and as he or she reads, an act of prediction often occurs. The reader develops expectations, logical guesses about where the text is taking him or her. This predictive capacity is not something to avoid but something to develop. Doing so suggests your engagement with the material, and even a wrong prediction is a valuable one, because the correction to your expectation is often the source of new knowledge that surprises and informs you.

Read the Text

Read the text all the way through, perhaps making some quick checks in the margin for places that surprise or challenge you. As you read, look for answers to the questions you developed after you surveyed the text.

Annotate/Mark theText

Now read the text again with pen in hand, prepared to do some serious marking this time around. This will involve a slower re-reading. Notice that you do not annotate (or highlight for that matter) on the first reading. Doing so tends to produce wanton, or indiscriminate, marking and highlighting, and the pen and highlighter tend to become pacers leading you through the text and turning a nice white page into a nice yellow one. Don't deceive yourself into thinking that this sort of activity is what is meant by textbook marking!

Before you start this more careful re-reading, return again to the questions you formulated after your initial survey. Develop a shorthand for your annotations, perhaps always using a double underline on the text to indicate a thesis or main focusing statement. Try writing marginal summaries as you go along as well, since the ability to summarize a text is the surest way to show your command or "ownership" of the material. Also, respond intuitively in the margins; after all, your feelings as you read are important and sometimes provide the most important insights, even suggesting your overall reaction to the text. The more you interact with the text the better able you will be to do your response to it. You will know the text well.

Special Problems of The Non-Print Text

Doing these activities is a much simpler notion when you have a written text in front of you than if you are watching a film or studying a work of art. However, there are ways to record your reactions even with non-written texts, ways to keep a running log as you experience the "text." (One notable difficulty may be if you're sitting in a dimly lit theater; there it will be difficult to take notes so you'll want to make some mental notes and then record your ideas immediately after the viewing. Keep your notebook handy! Anything you can learn about the production before you see it will also help, so read the reviews and the synopses and the production notes and the handbill before watching a production in film or theater.)

Multi-Pass Reading

Some people refer to the process we're describing here as multi-pass reading. On your first pass, you're getting the lay of the land, thinking about the audience for the text, its apparent approach. On your next pass you're reading all the way through a text but you're not responding but are instead coming to terms with the text as a whole document. On the next pass you're re-reading and responding through annotations and text marking and marginal summary, essentially coming to terms with the text's message. On yet another reading you're skimming and scanning and thinking about the speaker (the name we sometimes give to the human being, the writer, behind the words you're reading). You ask yourself what you know about the speaker in terms of facts, whether directly stated or alluded to, (gender, race, age, affiliations, etc.), emotions (evidence in the text of the speaker's emotional response to his or her topic), and attitudes (evidence from the text of the speaker's intellectual response to his or her topic and conveyed as judgments or conclusions). Think throughout your multiple reading about audience and purpose. For whom did the writer write? What purpose(s) did the text serve? These kinds of questions can help you move from an objective restatement of a text's substance toward more penetrating observation and analysis of the text's aims and accomplishments. How did the writer hope to influence his or her readers' way of thinking or acting? And why?

Write In My Book? No Way!

As a final note here, the idea of annotating a written text sometimes causes consternation among students. They say they plan to return their textbooks at the end of the semester for a refund. This is a foolhardy approach, a false economy of a most dangerous kind. It simply won't work for the serious college student who knows that texts are returned to throughout an education, not read and then discarded. Real encounters with written texts are a messy business. Further, you are building a library, and if that image doesn't appeal to you, think of it this way: you're being invited to deface a published document. Have fun, be a rebel, make it yours! Someday you can show your children the outrageous things you once wrote in the margins of your texts. And by that time you may well appreciate the library you began to build back there during your college days.

Making Inferences

For our purposes, a text will be defined as anything we study closely for purposes of an academic response. When we respond to a text, we make inferences from a text.

Defining Inference

An inference is a conclusion based upon available information. We infer all the time, sometimes less wisely than others. For instance, we are pulled over by a policeman when driving across town and infer that we've made a moving violation. Or this: we receive a phone call from the Internal Revenue Service and infer that we're about to be audited. But we can't properly infer anything from the sketchy information provided here. The policeman could be looking for a lost child and hoping that we've seen her. The IRS could be calling to send us a lifetime achievement award for our conscientious income tax reporting. (All right, so that last one is unlikely, but you get the idea.) In order to convince an audience that an inference is correct, we must provide evidence sufficient to support our claims or suppositions.

The Inferential Thesis

To give a response is a way of talking back to a text-and remember a text can be any number of things, even an experience you've had which can be "read" or interpreted and reinterpreted through response. Notice the use of the phrase "talking back." Think of the response as a way of conversing, of engaging in dialogue, but think also of the slightly rebellious possibilities of talking back to someone. When you "talk back" there is an element of challenge, of healthy questioning, of constructive criticism. Something is out there, a text of some sort, and then there is a long pause, the silence that anticipates a response. The response you give will no doubt be expressive but probably it also will be persuasive. It should reflect what you know or have learned about a topic. It will take the conversation forward, not simply repeat what has already been said in the text itself. It will involve some risk, not mere ratification. It will question boundaries and will suggest a position, or what is sometimes called a "critical stance" or "critical position."

That is why a critical stance or position is the written demonstration of critical thinking, the goal of which is new intellectual territory. When you think critically you view a text in its entirety. You see the text via its parts, but you ask how it all adds up. The result is a thorough examination that captures the essence of the text and responds to it, resulting in a whole new shaping of the topic.

Sometimes in the early stages of developing an inferential thesis we may call it a working message . That sends the message that we're working on it, attempting in our drafts to state clearly and simply the position we're taking in our response and why we are taking it.

More on Evidence: Making Choices

Your response is only as good as your evidence, and your effectiveness as a response writer, your authority as it is sometimes called, will depend in large part upon your evidence. The kind of evidence you choose to use will vary according to the thesis you are proposing and the subject you are addressing. If, for instance, you are comparing two texts, then some of your evidence will be drawn from each of those texts and will no doubt require summary of both texts.

In general, a response is only as good as its understanding of the text being responded to. Therefore, thorough familiarity with the text is absolutely necessary, and the text itself provides the first and most important evidence for your thesis. Beyond that, however, your own experiences, observations, and knowledge can inform your thesis. Information gleaned from additional sources and experts in the field can form a further pillar of support.

When you select the evidence that best contributes to and develops your thesis, remember that simple summary at this point will not do. Rather, analysis of the material is needed. You are always endeavoring to explain how the evidence contributes to or develops your thesis, your line of thinking.

Further, strive to be both concrete and analytical. Refer back frequently to the text itself, providing brief, concrete details from the text to support your thesis. From these concrete pieces of evidence, derive analytical conclusions . As you write from these analytical conclusions, provide ample examples from the text, clarifying how those examples support your thesis. Strive to be thorough but not repetitive.

How Do I Get Started? Preliminary Considerations

Ask questions. Ask questions that probe beyond the obvious, the clearly stated, the facts. Instead the questions should ask "why," "how," "what does this mean," and "how does this connect to (or differ from or relate similarly to)" other things I know or think. You ask yourself about the context of the text and its author, suppositions inherent to that context. Then you go back to the original, skimming or scanning for places that address your questions. You look for specific kinds of information, rather like scanning a telephone book until you find what you're looking for. Once you find an area that looks promising, then you read the text more closely, looking for cues that answer the probing questions you've developed.

Do I Need Outside Sources?

Studying the original alone may be enough for purposes of your response, or you may need to draw upon outside or additional sources to provide the context and the contrast that you need for your analysis. The answer to the question depends upon many factors, including, perhaps most importantly, the expectations of your teacher for this assignment.

It is always appropriate to ask yourself what you know about a topic, activating your schema, your storehouse of accumulated knowledge, perhaps even personal experience with the topic if you have any. Then you ask yourself how the text you're studying challenges your experience, your expectations, your additional sources, your understanding because you're hoping to do something beyond mere reporting. Having found these challenges, these distinguishing features, distinctions, or areas of debate, you have also found the area(s) most promising for a response from you. For here, where you notice either surprise, contrast, movement into new space, or tension, lies the material waiting for a response from you, a response that is authentically yours. And now you get a sense of why response can be a creative and original act, which is not in any way to suggest that creativity and originality cannot also be collaboratively derived. The next step is to mine your response for an inferential thesis that will guide your formal, written response.

The Connection of Summary and Comprehension

To begin a critical stance or position you must first be able to summarize the thing being responded to. Critical thinking and the development of a critical position is movement from true understanding to original statement. You might use reporting expressions such as she "claims," he "recommends," and they "argue" to suggest in summary what the text has seemed to say. Keep in mind, too, that you simply must know the original text well before you can begin to respond in an informed way.

Your Context: The Assignment

Refer to the assignment you've been given. This should clarify the audience and purpose for the response you are giving. Since so much depends upon audience and purpose, it is wise to spend some dedicated time making this evaluation. Ask yourself these kinds of questions: Who is my audience? What is the purpose of this assignment? What can I safely assume about my audience's knowledge? What might I have to offer to the conversation on this topic, or how might I further the thinking on this topic, given what I know and what my audience knows? What are the expectations for this assignment? Is there a specific task implied by the assignment-for instance, a comparison of two texts? There may be other questions that come to mind for you, and since no one knows the context of the assignment better than you, we would expect your questions to differ somewhat from the suggested ones given here.

The Text's Context

Then step back from the reporting and ask some questions about the text, such as "Why would he/she/they say this/do this/make this, etc? What do I know about this source? What is its context? Its author's context? Is the text predictable? What would you expect from this context, or does it somehow surprise? What position would be taken by persons coming from other contexts? These kinds of questions can begin the formulation of your own critical stance or position.

Ideas for Finding and Developing a Critical Stance

Next, think back to your summarization process. If there were places where you had difficulty summarizing, these problematic areas may provide clue as to one or more weaknesses in the text's statement or argument or they may suggest areas of new information for you. With any text, you can ask:

1) Are the connections of the parts to the whole reasonable and clear?

2) Are all the parts of the text easily made to fit, to follow, or developed as logically and reasonably as you might expect

3) Is the evidence appropriate and sufficient?

You might also think of these questions as tests-tests for logical consistency, for inherent assumptions, for degree of examination.

If Your Tests Reveal Weaknesses

If, upon further examination of the text, you are able to discern weaknesses in argument, or use of evidence or something else, then you may well have begun to find your critical stance. There may be questions the studied text failed to respond to fully. There may be an underrepresented or misrepresented side of the story with which you are familiar. There may be one or more faults in logic or use of evidence. You may be aware of these problems from your own life experiences or you may find that in doing further reading there are issues on which the text is inadequate.

If Your Tests Reveal Few Weaknesses or You Essentially Concur With the Text

What if you find yourself agreeing completely with the text you are responding to? Is it still possible to respond? The answer is yes. Even agreement can yield an important critical position or stance. By having looked closely, you should be able to describe what is there, and your reader will appreciate your thorough knowledge of the text. Further, an aggressive counterpoint to the text is not always necessary; sometimes, in fact, you may choose to support and enlarge or amplify a text's claims, rather than to refute them. In other words, perhaps you could extend a text with which you essentially agree, suggest through your own evidence ways to beef up the author's presentation.

Other Ideas for Developing a Critical Stance

• Construct a different side to the text's position, even if this construction involves some imagination on your part and is not really in keeping with your beliefs. Try writing this conflicting view in a single draft called "The Other Side."
• Ask yourself what the contribution of the text is to a body of knowledge, the text's contribution to general knowledge. Locate the text within a larger framework. How does this text differ or appear to be the same as previous texts?
• Read the text for tone. What does the text additionally communicate via subtle (or not so subtle) cues?
• Read the text for structural decisions and overall intent. Ask yourself: Is this text, as a whole, reflecting, reporting, explaining, persuading? Is it composed of a series of structural decisions-in other words, does it report, then explain, and finally persuade?

The injection of one's own thoughts distinguishes response from summary. Remember that with summary you remain true, or close, to the original text. As such you remind your reader over and over (through author tags, for instance) that the ideas you are representing are not your own but belong to someone else.

When summary ends and response begins, you should provide some clear markers. One clear way to do this is with a paragraph change. Additionally, it is a good idea to declare your presence through use of the first person "I," as in "I believe," "I think," "I have found." Do not be shy about this; despite the familiar advice to keep your academic writing away from the first person, there are occasions where first person is not only acceptable but desirable. A response essay can be one such occasion. If, however, you are nervous about this, the best recommendation is always to check with the individual instructor for whom the response is being completed.

Collaboration and Conversation

When it comes to response there are few strategies more powerful for generating ideas and a solid response than collaboration through conversation. When we converse we engage in a dynamic give and take of minds that is aided by our proximity to others, especially when that dialogue occurs in person and, though to a lesser degree, also when we converse via telephonic or electronic exchange. Talking alongside another we gain the benefit of facial expressions, gestures, interruptions for clarification, inflections of voice, and other nonverbal forms of communication. Additionally, we are the beneficiaries of adjustments and accommodations that are made almost instantaneously as we tailor our response to the audience we confront. Clarification is done almost without thinking, and we are nearly without limitation as to our ability to modify spontaneously.

Negotiated Meaning

Perhaps most importantly, when we converse we reap immediate benefit from the ideas of others around us. Thus, conversation serves a broad social function as we strive in our dialogue with others to work out cooperative understanding, or what is sometimes called "negotiated meaning." We extend our understanding by hearing other voices and alternative perspectives, and, in turn, those others benefit from hearing us. Conversation is thus a powerful mechanism for furthering insight.

Small Groups

When you can, you should seek out small groups for just this purpose, especially when you are initially dealing with new texts. Exploration, divergence, discussion, examination, interpretation, and resolution are some of the things a member of a conversing small group might hope to gain from such an experience. And with both amplification and challenge, your responses will improve-almost certainly.

Internalized Audience: Strive to Develop

By the same token, it will not always be possible for you to engage in conversation regarding every text you respond to in your college career. On those occasions when dialogue is not possible, you lose all the benefits of hearing outside interpretations, and this can be a significant handicap. However, it is possible to develop a voice of dissension, what we might call the voice of the loyal opposition, that voice or internalized audience whose position you are able to imagine and hence profit from. Since your own response will stand up better after being subjected to the imagined criticism of others, it is always wise to engage in dialogue with at least your internalized audience.

Developing a Response

Depending upon the assignment and upon your preferences, one or more of the following approaches to response should get you started on a suitable response.

Development Approaches

Kinds of evidence, structuring the response, inductive and deductive presentations of response, interpolating and extrapolating.

• Analyze the effectiveness of the text. Here the response focuses on the most important elements of the text and evaluates their effectiveness (the clarity of the main idea, the organization of the argument, the quality of the evidence, the overall effect of the text, conveyed through tone and apparent attitude of the text's author.) We might also think of this option as critique or review.
• Agree or disagree with the ideas in the text. Here the response focuses on a respondent's reaction to the ideas or effect of the text. It is important to note here that often it is not necessary (or even desirable) to completely agree or complete disagree. In fact, a quite reasonable and credible response will agree with some points and disagree with others.
• Interpret and reflect on the text. Here the respondent explains, examines, and/or theorizes on the meaning of the whole and the parts of the text, its implications and its contributions to understanding of the topic.

Different kinds of evidence can be chosen to support these response types. You might well use:

• evidence from the text itself
• personal experience
• outside sources
• or some combination of these.

It is rarely necessary to use all three of these kinds of evidence, but the important thing is to have sufficient evidence to support the ideas you're proposing, the point you're making, and to ensure that you are indeed providing a main, overall point-the inferential thesis--that is coherent. A simple laundry list will not do.

Typically a response will take one of the forms suggested below in outline or skeletal form.

• Introduction to text(s)
• Summary of text(s)
• Point 3, etc.

Or here's another format. Notice the initial focus upon key issues.

• Introduction to key issues
• Point 2, etc.

Or here's another, integrating summary and response.

• Introduction to issues and/or text(s)
• Summary of text's point 1/response to point 1
• Summary of text's point 2/response to point 2
• Summary of text's point 3/response to point 3, etc.

Sometimes it also helps to think of sequencing or arranging your response in either an inductive format or a deductive format. An inductive format builds toward a conclusion, since an inductive process is "emergent," one thing leading to another, building upon another, like scaffolding. The inferential thesis with an inductive approach would come near the end of the essay. With a deductive format, the inferential thesis is delivered at the beginning, right up front. Think of this approach as "spilling the beans," essentially telling all that you know from the beginning and then using the rest of the essay to support or defend (provide evidence for) your thesis. In theory, either development is suitable, but it should also be said that there is a rather strong preference in much of college writing for the deductive approach.

Another way to think about the development of your response is to consider the concepts of interpolation and extrapolation. To interpolate is to bring external ideas to a text so that these external ideas inform, enlarge, elucidate, or even refute the text. To extrapolate is to take what you learn in one place or one text and apply it to a different context, one that perhaps seems to bear little resemblance to the original context.

Example of Interpolation and Extrapolation

Consider an example of Sally Smith, college student. She is taking several humanities courses and has recently learned in a philosophy course that a human's interpretation of experience can vary widely and according to the cultural background and context of the person. Among other things Sally is studying in this philosophy course are Native American representations of the relationship between humans and the earth. At the same time Sally is assigned to read and respond to Moby Dick along with selected secondary sources for her American Lit class. She finds that none of the assigned secondary sources was written from a Native American perspective.

As a point of fact, the philosophy course and Native American culture really have no direct relationship to Sally's American Lit course, but she sees a relationship between what isn't being discussed there and what she is learning in another class. Further, she feels she has been changed by studying a non-European way of looking at and living in nature, and she believes her audience might be newly informed themselves if she were to bring something of her new perspective to her response paper. Increasingly she believes that she can't ignore her increasingly sophisticated ways of viewing the world, is gaining confidence as she learns and connects her learning among classes. As a matter of course, then, Sally finds she can't help but "extrapolate" some of this new-found knowledge, as she reflects upon the novel from what she thinks would be a Native American perspective, or at least as close as she can come to that from her admittedly limited knowledge. During a discussion period of the literature class Sally finds herself wondering how differently the discussion might go if a Native American perspective were articulated.

Sally is extrapolating, applying newfound knowledge to a novel situation.

Then comes the next step, the paper Sally must write. As she applies her newly informed knowledge of the sacredness of non-human living things to her response to Moby Dick (and its secondary sources) she is interpolating, bringing an external idea into the text she's studying. Perhaps she even winds up questioning how "American" this American classic is.

A Process for Writing a Response

There is no one correct process, only approaches and strategies as varied as people. However, some practices seem to work well for many people, and so an example is presented here to get you started. This is not a prescription; adapt and adjust the process to meet your needs, your best practices, and your assignment requirements.

Getting Started

Because response always comes as a result of something, some text that precedes it, which must be read and responded to, the process of writing a response actually begins with reading. Don't shortchange this part of the process because your success throughout the process will depend on your initial attentiveness to the text you are responding to.

One important thing to think about as you begin a response process is the assignment itself. What do you know about the audience and the purpose of the response you are about to write? What more do you need to find out?

A second thing to consider is the deadline for the assignment. Be clear in your own mind about due dates, and then backward plan from that due date to the current date. Divide up the tasks of the response, allowing yourself time to read, react, draft, collaborate, revise, and even seek a full-scale peer response or workshop opportunity.

Don't allow yourself to procrastinate simply because the task seems overwhelming; instead, chip away at it, a little bit at a time, and you may be surprised at how smoothly things go. Among other things, when you address the assignment early and give yourself time to think (and actually do that thinking instead of avoiding it) you actually end up incubating ideas even when you're not fully conscious that you are doing so. This mulling over of your response will tend to make the writing of the response go much more easily and should actually help you produce a better response because of your full engagement with the material. Starting early will help you filter out less good responses over the course of the assignment period.

Just as soon as your initial reading of the text has been accomplished, then critical thinking can begin, and this is perhaps the most essential component of your pre-writing efforts. A good place to start is with a double-entry journal.

Double-entry Journal

Consider using a journal to first explore your initial and individual responses to the text. One particularly helpful form of journal for responses is called the dialectic or double-entry journal. In this kind of journal, you divide a standard piece of notebook paper down the middle and first record your summary of a text in one column and your ideas, questions, and reactions in the second column. If you have trouble getting started or are worried about getting full coverage with a double-entry journal, try thinking of the text in terms of four elements:

• the text's audience
• the text's main idea or main effect
• the text's organization, its forms and features of support used to create, enhance, and amplify the main idea or effect
• the text's style and tone

Early Collaboration Strategies: The Importance of Peers

Even at this stage it is not too early to begin collaborating and conversing with peers to strengthen and enlarge your response. In fact, you could begin even before you have made your first entry into your journal. Instead, you could read the text in a small group, stopping ever few paragraphs to record together what has happened so far and to predict where the text is going.

Try Collaborative Prediction as a group strategy. With this approach, the group reads a text for the first time together. A member reads two paragraphs aloud and then stops. Members of the group summarize aloud what has happened in the text and discuss what the group predicts will happen next. Then the group reads a full page, stops and predicts again. Do this a third time, reading another full page and summarizing in one sentence what has happened and predicting the next step. Now the group stops and writes a forecast for the whole essay. The group then reads through to the end to see how close they've come to anticipating the text's direction.

Once your initial journal entry is complete, try doing a Collaborative Annotation of the text. First, each member records (probably before class) his or her response in the margins of the individual's text; then each member of the group reads (one paragraph at a time) his or her response aloud and the group collaborates to choose the best of the responses. The group then records a consensus response (selecting best responses as you go along) in the margins of a common copy of the text.

Alternatively, your group could debate the strengths and weaknesses of the text.

No matter how or when you do a collaboration or conversation, however, make sure to record your personal reflections on the collaborative subject. What new responses did you hear in the discussion? How has the conversation affected your initial response? Where might you revise your reactions? How will your focus be altered by exposure to these other responses?

The Exploratory Draft

You're at the point now of trying an exploratory draft, writing just for yourself, to find out how you feel and what you have to say in response to the text at hand. At this stage, you are not thinking about communicating with others so much as you are writing to think, or to discover what you think.

Once you have an exploratory draft, you're at another juncture where collaborating and conversing with a peer may be helpful. When you involve a peer or a small group of peers in reading your exploratory draft, you can direct their reading by asking them to tell you what they find to be your central point as well as what they find most surprising or intriguing. By directing their reading, your peers will be less likely to treat your exploratory draft as a finished product and will seek instead to answer your questions. You might ask your collaborators to name their concerns about the things you have said in the response, to take issue where they disagree and say a bit about their beliefs. Taking into account such additional information will inform and improve your subsequent drafts.

You may find that you need several exploratory drafts before you really know what it is you mostly want to say.

A Rough Draft of Your Response

Perhaps you have now written several exploratory drafts, have collaborated and conversed with peers until you have a fairly good idea of what you want to do in the response paper. Now you can begin to plan your draft, thinking more concretely about your audience, about the work you'll need to do to convey your main idea, to enlarge and amplify the supporting points, to reduce and cut and less important information, to rearrange and sequence your points.

Now you are thinking less about focus because that is clear in your mind. You are beginning to think more about presentation. The goal now is to provide sufficient support of the right kind and to organize it in such a way that you achieve maximum effect.

At this point you will also want to think about your tone in the response, whether you are conveying the attitude you intend. Your collaborators may be better judges of the overall effect of your writing than you are. Ask your peers to read this draft for that issue only. Do I sound smug? Sarcastic? Unnecessarily hostile? Inappropriate humorous or flip? Does my tone fit my message and my subject?

You may also be ready at this point to start putting final touches on things so by all means do the very best job you can with proofreading and mechanics, and then do not hesitate to ask a peer reader to look at your response for these matters as well.

Checking Your Inferential Thesis

Ask yourself if you have an inferential thesis, a statement of your critical stance regarding this text. Remember that an inference is a conclusion based upon available information. Reliable inferences are grounded in the text itself and demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the text. Remember that your audience will not believe your inference, regardless of how true it is, unless you are able to show why the inference is reasonable and accurate. Your job essentially is to persuade your reader, using evidence which supports your conclusion or inference.

Checking Your Development Decisions

A hundred different developments might well be possible for your response, and so it should not be concluded that a rigid format for response is a reliable tool. It's not as simple as taking a formatted approach and simply plugging in your data, your evidence. Rather, the subject, the assignment, the audience, and the text itself should inform your decisions about the development options for your response. Given this caution, however, three of the most common methods of responding include:

• agree or disagreeing with text's points or presentation
• interpreting or analyzing the text's points or presentation
• critiqueing or reviewing the text's effectiveness

Checking Your Evidence

The development of your response is completely dependent upon the kinds of evidence you choose to use to support your inferential thesis. Typical kinds of evidence for responses are drawn from personal experience, from outside sources, and, most importantly, from the text itself. It is not necessary to include all of three of these kinds of evidence for every kind of response, but almost certainly your evidence will include references to the text itself.

Choose the kind of evidence that makes sense for your essay. There is nothing wrong with drawing upon personal experience unless it really doesn't cast light on the topic or unless other forms of evidence would work better. Outside sources can often provide perspectives you might not have possessed before reading them; however, the use of outside sources does not eliminate the need for you to formulate your own conclusions and your own inferential thesis. Use outside sources, if you choose to use them at all, to add credibility and authority to your points.

Most importantly, remember that your primary task in a response is to react to the text itself. Stay close to the text, whatever form it may take, in formulating and delivering your response. Regardless of the other kinds of evidence you select for your response, your first and more important one is always the text itself.

Late Collaboration: Formalized Peer Response

It may not be possible to engage your peers for as many responses to your paper as this process suggests, but having completed your rough draft with all the thoughts of focus, organization, and mechanics at the forefront of your mind, you may wish for one last peer response, and this one might take a more formal, wholistic approach. At this point you might seek out an in-class workshop in which the entire class or a small group responds to your paper, or you might engage in a reciprocal take-home review with a peer, or you may want to send a computer copy to one or more people in your class.

At this stage, since you will probably not seek additional peer assistance after this point, you want to get the most you can from your peers. On your draft, label summary and label response. Underline your thesis statement. Perhaps underline the topic sentences for the paragraphs that introduce the main lines of development or support of that thesis. Accompany the draft with the one or two most important questions you have at this point regarding your paper. Write your most urgent questions for your readers at either the top or the bottom of your response.

Draft One and Draft Two Questions: Another Way to Approach Process

Here's another idea that may help you think further about your response. Try a Draft One that provides your response from the point of view you are inclined to take and then follow this draft with a Draft Two that introduces a new perspective into the discussion. A Draft One/Draft Two approach ensures that you are looking at your topic from multiple perspectives, which is not only good for enlarging your way of looking at things but is also practical and effective at helping you write a better paper. Deep knowledge of another perspective will help you anticipate the possible questions and doubts of your audience. Deep knowledge of another perspective also will tend to help you develop better explanations for your judgments.

The Final Draft

In truth there are no final drafts, only final deadlines, so as you complete the last draft you will be able to do before your deadline, return to your original assignment and goals for the response assignment. Think one last time about your audience. Have you responded to the assignment and its implicit audience?

Review your thesis. Is it clearly stated? Do all of your supporting points really support your thesis? What method of response did you select-agree/disagree, interpret/analyze, critique/review? What forms of evidence or support did you choose to use in addition to the text itself-personal experience, additional sources?

Take a final look at your level of amplification. Did you say enough? Is there proper balance among the parts, or are the proportions right for the points you are making? Did you sequence these points to maximum effect?

How about sentences and paragraphs? Are your paragraphs unified and coherent? Do they all contribute to your points? Are your sentences varied and emphatic? Does each contribute to the paragraph to which it belongs? What about proofreading? Did you use the spell check function on your word processing software and then follow up with a rereading to catch words spell check misses? How about punctuation? Have you gone back over your draft and considered the patterns of mechanical error you typically have problems with and attempted to correct them? If you have printed out your final draft and it's due in ten minutes, pencil in changes rather than turn in a paper that has errors. Most of your professors would rather see that you've attempted to make corrections than see a pristinely typed, though uncorrected manuscript.

Doe, Sue. (2004). Responding. Writing@CSU . Colorado State University. https://writing.colostate.edu/guides/guide.cfm?guideid=34

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How to Write a Response Paper: Outline, Steps & Examples

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Response essays are a frequent assignment in many academic courses. Professors often ask students to share their thoughts and feelings about a variety of materials, such as books, articles, films, songs, or poems. To write an effective response paper, you should follow a specific structure to ensure that your ideas are well-organized and presented in a logical manner.

In this blog post, we will explore how to write a good outline and how it is used to develop a quality reaction essay. You will also come across a response paper example to help you better understand steps involved in writing a response essay.  Continue reading to explore writing tips from professional paper writers that you can use to improve your skills.

What Is a Response Paper?

It is vital to understand the meaning of a response essay before you start writing. Often, learners confuse this type of academic work with reviews of books, articles, events, or movies, which is not correct, although they seem similar.  A response paper gives you a platform to express your point of view, feelings, and understanding of a given subject or idea through writing. Unlike other review works, you are also required to give your idea, vision, and values contained in literal materials. In other words, while a response paper is written in a subjective way, a review paper is written in a more objective manner.  A good reaction paper links the idea in discussion with your personal opinion or experience. Response essays are written to express your deep reflections on materials, what you have understood, and how the author's work has impacted you.

Purpose of a Response Essay

Understanding reasons for writing a reaction paper will help you prepare better work. The purpose of a response essay will be:

• To summarize author's primary ideas and opinions: you need to give a summary of materials and messages the author wants you to understand.
• Providing a reflection on the subject: as a writer, you also need to express how you relate to authors' ideas and positions.
• To express how the subject affects your personal life: when writing a response paper, you are also required to provide your personal outcome and lesson learned from interacting with the material.

Response Essay Outline

You should adhere to a specific response paper outline when working on an essay. Following a recommended format ensures that you have a smooth flow of ideas. A good response paper template will make it easier for a reader to separate your point of view from author's opinion. The essay is often divided into these sections: introduction, body, and conclusion paragraphs.  Below is an example of a response essay outline template:

• Briefly introduce the topic of the response paper
• State your thesis statement or main argument
• Provide a brief summary of the source material you are responding to
• Include key details or arguments from the source
• Analyze the source material and identify strengths and weaknesses
• Evaluate the author's arguments and evidence
• Provide your own perspective on the source material
• Respond to the source material and critique its arguments
• Offer your own ideas and counterarguments
• Support your response with evidence and examples
• Summarize your main points and restate your thesis
• Provide final thoughts on the source material and its implications
• Offer suggestions for further research or inquiry

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Response Paper Introduction

The success of response papers is partly dependent on how well you write the introductory paragraph. As with any academic paper, the introduction paragraph welcomes targeted readers and states the primary idea.  Below is a guideline on how to start a response essay:

• Provide a compelling hook to capture the attention of your target audience.
• Provide background information about the material, including the name and author of the work.
• Provide a brief summary of main points to bring readers who are unfamiliar with the work up to task and enable them to follow up on your subsequent analysis.
• Write a thesis statement at the end of your introductory paragraph to inform readers about the purpose and argument you are trying to relay.

Response Essay Thesis Statement

A thesis statement summarizes a paper's content within a sentence or two. A response essay thesis statement is not any different! The final sentence of the introductory paragraph of a reaction paper should give readers an idea of the message that will be discussed in your paper.  Do you know how to write a thesis statement for a response essay? If you follow the steps below, you should be able to write one:

• Review the material you are responding to, and pinpoint main points expressed by authors.
• Determine points of view or opinions you are going to discuss in the essay.
• Develop your thesis statement. It should express a summary of what will be covered in your reaction. The sentence should also consider logical flow of ideas in your writing.
• Thesis statement should be easy to spot. You should preferably place it at the end of your introductory paragraph.

Response Paper Body Paragraph

In most instances, the body section has between 1 and 3 paragraphs or more. You should first provide a summary of the article, book, or any other literature work you are responding to.  To write a response essay body paragraph that will capture the attention of readers, you must begin by providing key ideas presented in the story from the authors' point of view. In the subsequent paragraph, you should tell your audience whether you agree or disagree with these ideas as presented in the text. In the final section, you should provide an in-depth explanation of your stand and discuss various impacts of the material.

Response Paper Conclusion

In this section of a response paper, you should provide a summary of your ideas. You may provide key takeaways from your thoughts and pinpoint meaningful parts of the response. Like any other academic work, you wind up your response essay writing by giving a summary of what was discussed throughout the paper.  You should avoid introducing new evidence, ideas, or repeat contents that are included in body paragraphs in the conclusion section. After stating your final points, lessons learned, and how the work inspires you, you can wrap it up with your thesis statement.

How to Write a Response Paper?

In this section, we will provide you with tips on how to write a good response paper. To prepare a powerful reaction essay, you need to consider a two-step approach. First, you must read and analyze original sources properly. Subsequently, you also need to organize and plan the essay writing part effectively to be able to produce good reaction work. Various steps are outlined and discussed below to help you better understand how to write a response essay.

1. Pick a Topic for Your Response Essay

Picking a topic for response essay topics can be affected either by the scope of your assignment as provided by your college professor or by your preference. Irrespective of your reason, the guideline below should help you brainstorm topic ideas for your reaction:

• Start from your paper's end goal: consider what outcomes you wish to attain from writing your reaction.
• Prepare a list of all potential ideas that can help you attain your preferred result.
• Sort out topics that interest you from your list.
• Critique your final list and settle on a topic that will be comfortable to work on.

Below are some examples of good topics for response essay to get you started:

• Analyzing ideas in an article about effects of body shaming on mental health .
• Reaction paper on new theories in today's business environment.
• Movies I can watch again and again.
• A response essay on a documentary.
• Did the 9/11 terror attacks contribute to issues of religious intolerance?

2. Plan Your Thoughts and Reactions

To better plan your thoughts and reactions, you need to read the original material thoroughly to understand messages contained therein. You must understand author's line of thinking, beliefs, and values to be able to react to their content. Next, note down ideas and aspects that are important and draw any strong reactions.  Think through these ideas and record potential sequences they will take in your response paper. You should also support your opinions and reactions with quotes and texts from credible sources. This will help you write a response essay for the college level that will stand out.

3. Write a Detailed Response Paper Outline

Preparing a detailed response paper outline will exponentially improve the outcome of your writing. An essay outline will act as a benchmark that will guide you when working on each section of the paper. Sorting your ideas into sections will not only help you attain a better flow of communication in your responsive essay but also simplify your writing process.  You are encouraged to adopt the standard response essay outline provided in the sample above. By splitting your paper into introduction, body, and conclusion paragraphs, you will be able to effectively introduce your readers to ideas that will be discussed and separate your thoughts from authors' messages.

4. Write a Material Summary

For your audience to understand your reaction to certain materials, you should at first provide a brief summary of authors' points of view. This short overview should include author's name and work title.  When writing a response essay, you should dedicate a section to give an informative summary that clearly details primary points and vital supporting arguments. You must thoroughly understand the literature to be able to complete this section.  For important ideas, you can add direct quotes from the original sources in question. Writers may sometimes make a mistake of summarizing general ideas by providing detailed information about every single aspect of the material. Instead of addressing all ideas in detail, focus on key aspects.  Although you rely on your personal opinion and experience to write a response paper, you must remain objective and factual in this section. Your subjective opinion will take center stage in the personal reaction part of the essay.

Example of a Response Summary

Below is a sample summary response essays example to help you better understand how to write one. A Summary of The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

The classic film The Adventure of Robin Hood (1938), as directed by Michael Curtis and William Keighley, stars an infamous outlaw, Robin Hood, who "robbed from the rich and gave to the poor''. The charismatic and charming Saxon lord, Robin Hood (Flynn), becomes an outlaw and seeks justice for poor people by fighting Sir Guy of Gisborne (Rathbone), Sheriff of Nottingham (Copper), and Prince John (Rains), who were oppressing people. After assembling an outlaw group, Robin defies the excessive taxes imposed on poor people by stealing from wealthy individuals and redistributing wealth to the destitute in society. Robin Hood is eventually lured into an archery tournament and gets arrested, but survives an execution. He later helps King Richard to regain his lost throne and banish Prince John.

5. Share Your Reaction

After summarizing the original material, the second part of a response paper involves writing your opinion about author’s point of view. After a thorough review of the material, you should be able to express your perspective on the subject.  In this section, you are expected to detail how the material made you feel and how it relates to your personal life, experience, and values. Within the short response essay, you may also be required to state whether you agree or disagree with author's line of thinking. How does the material relate to current issues, or in what way does it impact your understanding of a given subject? Does it change your opinion on the subject in any way? Your reaction should answer these questions.  In addition, you may also be required to outline potential advantages and shortcomings of the material in your reaction. Finally, you should also indicate whether or not you would endorse the literal work to others.

Reaction in Response Body Paragraph Example

Below is a reaction in a response essay body paragraph sample to help you improve your skills in writing the response body paragraph: Reaction Paragraph Example

My main takeaway from watching The Adventure of Robin Hood (1938) is that society should prioritize good and justice over laws if the set rules oppress people. Prince John, Sir Guy, and Sheriff Cooper were cruel and petty and used existing laws to oppress and exploit poor people. In response, Robin Hood employed unorthodox means and tried to help oppressed people in society. I agree with his way of thinking. Laws are made to protect people in society and ensure justice is served. Therefore, when legislation fails to serve its purpose, it becomes redundant. Even in current society, we have seen democratic governments funding coups when presidents start oppressing their people. Such coups are supported despite the fact that presidency is protected by law. Although Robin Hood's actions might encourage unlawfulness if taken out of context, I would still recommend this film because its main message is advocating for justice in the community.

6. Conclude Your Response Essay

Do you know how to write a response paper conclusion? It should be the icing on the cake. Irrespective of how good previous sections were, your reaction essay will not be considered to be exceptional if you fail to provide a sum up of your reaction, ideas, and arguments in the right manner.  When writing a response essay conclusion , you should strive to summarize the outcome of your thoughts. After stating your final point, tell readers what you have learned and how that material inspired or impacted you. You can also explain how your perspective and the author's point of view intertwine with each other.  Never introduce new ideas in the conclusion paragraph. Presenting new points will not only disrupt the flow of ideas in the paper but also confuse your readers because you may be unable to explain them comprehensively.  You are also expected to link up your discussions with the thesis statement. In other words, concluding comments and observations need to incorporate the reaffirmation of the thesis statement.

Example of Response Paper Conclusion

You can use the responsive essay conclusion sample below as a benchmark to guide you in writing your concluding remarks: Conclusion Example

There are a lot of similarities between the film's message and my opinion, values, and beliefs. Based on my personal principles, I believe the actions of the main character, Robin Hood, are justifiable and acceptable. Several people in modern society would also agree with my perspective. The movie has provided me with multiple lessons and inspirations. The main lesson acquired is that laws are not ultimate and that we should analyze how they affect people rather than adhere to them blindly. Unless legislation protects people and serves justices, it should be considered irrelevant. Also, morality outweighs legislation. From the movie, I gathered that morality should be the foundation for all laws, and at any time, morality and greater good should be prioritized above laws. The main inspiration relates to being brave in going against some legislation since the end justifies the means sometimes. My point of view and that of the movie creators intertwine. We both advocate for human decency and justice. The argument discussed supports the idea that good and justice is greater than law.

Proofread Your Response Paper

It is important to proofread your response paper before submitting it for examination. Has your essay met all instructional requirements? Have you corrected every grammatical error in your paper? These are common questions you should be asking yourself.  Proofreading your work will ensure that you have eliminated mistakes made when working on your academic work. Besides, you also get the opportunity to improve your logical flow of ideas in your paper by proofreading.  If you review your work thoroughly before submitting it for marking, you are more likely to score more marks! Use our Paper Rater , it is a tool that can help you pinpoint errors, which makes going through your work even simpler.

Response Essay Examples

If you have never written this type of academic paper before, responsive essay examples should help you grasp the primary concepts better. These response paper samples not only help you to familiarize yourself with paper's features but also help you to get an idea of how you should tackle such an assignment. Review at least one written response essay example from the compilation below to give you the confidence to tackle a reaction paper. Response essay example: Book

Response paper example: Poem

Response paper sample: Movie

Example of a response paper: Article

Sample response essay: Issue

Response Paper Format

It is important to follow a recommended response essay format in order to adhere to academic writing standards needed for your assignment. Formats depend on your institution or the discipline.  A reaction paper can be written in many different academic writing styles, including APA, MLA, and Chicago, with each demanding a slightly different format.  The outlook of the paper and referencing varies from one writing style to another. Despite the format for a response paper, you must include introduction, body, and conclusion paragraphs.

Response Essay Writing Tips

Below are some of the best tips you can use to improve your response papers writing skills:

• Review your assignment instructions and clarify any inquiries before you start a response paper.
• Once you have selected topics for response essay, reviewed your original materials, and came up with your thesis statement, use topic sentences to facilitate logical flow in your paper.
• Always ensure that you format your work as per the standard structure to ensure that you adhere to set academic requirements. Depending on the academic writing style you will be using, ensure that you have done your in-text citation as per the paper format.
• If you have never worked on this kind of academic paper, you should review examples and samples to help you familiarize yourself with this type of work. You should, however, never plagiarize your work.
• You can use a first-person perspective to better stress your opinion or feelings about a subject. This tip is particularly crucial for reaction part of your work.
• Finally, before submitting your work, proofread your work.

Bottom Line on Response Paper Writing

As discussed in this blog post, preparing a response paper follows a two-step approach. To successfully work on these sections, you need to plan properly to ensure a smooth transition from the reading and analyzing the original material to writing your reaction. In addition, you can review previous works to improve your writing skills.  So, what is a response essay that will immediately capture the attention of your instructor? Well, it should have a captivating introduction, evidence backed reaction, and a powerful conclusion. If you follow various tips outlined above and sum up your work with thorough proofreading, there is no chance that you can fail this type of assignment.

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FAQ About Response Paper

1. how long is a short response essay.

The length of a short response essay varies depending on topic and your familiarity with the subject. Depending on how long original sources are and how many responsive points you have, your reaction paper can range from a single paragraph of 150-400 words to multiple paragraphs of 250-500 words.

2. How to start a response body paragraph?

Use an argumentative topic sentence to start your responsive paper paragraph. Failing to begin a paragraph with an elaborate topic sentence will confuse your readers. Topic sentences give readers an idea of what is being discussed in the section. Write a responsive body paragraph for every new idea you add.

3. Is reaction paper similar to a response paper?

Yes. Reaction papers and response essays are used interchangeably. Responsive essays analyze author's point of view and compare them with your personal perspective. This type of academic writing gives you freedom to share your feelings and opinion about an idea. People also discuss how ideas, concepts, and literature material influence them in a response paper.

Daniel Howard is an Essay Writing guru. He helps students create essays that will strike a chord with the readers.

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How to Write a Reader Response

Last Updated: March 19, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Diane Stubbs . Diane Stubbs is a Secondary English Teacher with over 22 years of experience teaching all high school grade levels and AP courses. She specializes in secondary education, classroom management, and educational technology. Diane earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Delaware and a Master of Education from Wesley College. There are 9 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 442,321 times.

A reader response assignment asks you to explain and defend your personal reaction to an assigned text. Reader response papers can be difficult because they force you, the reader, to take responsibility for giving meaning to the text. Often these assignments feel open-ended and vague, but don't worry, a good reader response paper will follow a standard essay format that you can easily master. This guide will walk you through the creation of a well-crafted reader response paper that's sure to wow your instructor and earn you an awesome grade.

Writing the Reader Response

• It is often helpful to use the first body paragraph to include more information about the text, the plotline, major themes, etc., and then use the rest of the paragraphs to provide an analysis of how you felt about the text.

• Remember that a reader response is meant to be personal, so it's OK to incorporate personal anecdotes and opinions into your analysis.
• Example: "Forcing Hester Prynne to wear the scarlet "A" reminded me of a time when I was cyber-bullied in eighth grade, and my "friends" spread rumors about me online where the whole school could see."

• Example: "At the end of The Old Man and the Sea, Manolin promises to once again fish with Santiago, so the old man no longer has to be alone. This was Santiago's greatest wish, but it was a different kind of success than he initially set out to achieve."

• Example: "'My big fish must be somewhere,' said Santiago. This is exactly how I felt after I received my third rejection letter, but like Santiago, I kept trying, and eventually I was accepted."
• Make sure and cite your examples per class directions. You will usually be required to note the page numbers of any quotations or specific examples in parentheses at the end of the sentence.

• A great way to think of your conclusion is that it's one last chance to explain to your reader how you see all of your points fitting together.

• Sometimes it's hard to see our own mistakes, so it can really help to exchange papers with a friend, and proofread each other's work.

Drafting the Reader Response

• "Even though I found The Scarlett Letter hard to follow at times, Hester Prynne's story is still relatable, and made me think a lot about the effects of publicly shaming people online."
• "Some people believe the Old Man and the Sea is a book about failure, but it is really a story of perseverance that teaches us that success may not always come in the form we expect, and even disasters can lead to positive outcomes."

• Introduction: 1 paragraph.
• Analysis/Body Paragraphs: 3-4 paragraphs. How you organize these paragraphs will depend on the parameters of the assignment.
• Conclusion: 1 paragraph.

Reading the Text

• Do you like or dislike the text?
• Can you identify the author's purpose?
• Do you agree or disagree with the author?
• Does the text relate to you and your life? If so, how? If not, why not?
• Does the text agree with, or go against your personal world view?
• What, if anything, did you learn from the text?

• Taking a bit of extra time during this phase will save you a lot of time in the writing process. [9] X Research source

• I think that...
• I feel that...
• I see that...
• I have learned that...

Sample Reader Response

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• ↑ https://penandthepad.com/rules-writing-reading-response-essay-3968.html
• ↑ https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-jefferson-english102/chapter/reader-response-criticism-american-literature-i/
• ↑ https://writingstudio.gsu.edu/files/2021/02/Reading-Response.pdf
• ↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/the_writing_process/proofreading/steps_for_revising.html
• ↑ https://faculty.washington.edu/momara/Reader%20Response.pdf
• ↑ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/essay-outline/
• ↑ http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/rwc/handouts/the-writing-process-1/invention/Writing-a-Response-or-Reaction-Paper
• ↑ http://education-portal.com/articles/Step-by-Step_Guide_to_Writing_a_Great_Reading_Response_Paper.html
• ↑ https://www.hunter.cuny.edu/rwc/handouts/the-writing-process-1/invention/Writing-a-Response-or-Reaction-Paper

About This Article

To write a reader response, develop a clear thesis statement and choose example passages from the text that support your thesis. Next, write an introduction paragraph that specifies the name of the text, the author, the subject matter, and your thesis. Then, include 3-4 paragraphs that discuss and analyze the text. Finish up with a conclusion paragraph that summarizes your arguments and brings the reader back to your thesis or main point! For tips on analyzing the text before writing your assignment, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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How to Write a Critical Response Essay With Examples and Tips

16 January 2024

last updated

A critical response essay is an important type of academic essay, which instructors employ to gauge the students’ ability to read critically and express their opinions. Firstly, this guide begins with a detailed definition of a critical essay and an extensive walkthrough of source analysis. Next, the manual on how to write a critical response essay breaks down the writing process into the pre-writing, writing, and post-writing stages and discusses each stage in extensive detail. Finally, the manual provides practical examples of an outline and a critical response essay, which implement the writing strategies and guidelines of critical response writing. After the examples, there is a brief overview of documentation styles. Hence, students need to learn how to write a perfect critical response essay to follow its criteria.

Definition of a Critical Response Essay

A critical response essay presents a reader’s reaction to the content of an article or any other piece of writing and the author’s strategy for achieving his or her intended purpose. Basically, a critical response to a piece of text demands an analysis, interpretation, and synthesis of a reading. Moreover, these operations allow readers to develop a position concerning the extent to which an author of a text creates a desired effect on the audience that an author establishes implicitly or explicitly at the beginning of a text. Mostly, students assume that a critical response revolves around the identification of flaws, but this aspect only represents one dimension of a critical response. In turn, a critical response essay should identify both the strengths and weaknesses of a text and present them without exaggeration of their significance in a text.

Source Analysis

1. Questions That Guide Source Analysis

Writers engage in textual analysis through critical reading. Hence, students undertake critical reading to answer three primary questions:

• What does the author say or show unequivocally?
• What does the author not say or show outright but implies intentionally or unintentionally in the text?
• What do I think about responses to the previous two questions?

Readers should strive to comprehensively answer these questions with the context and scope of a critical response essay. Basically, the need for objectivity is necessary to ensure that the student’s analysis does not contain any biases through unwarranted or incorrect comparisons. Nonetheless, the author’s pre-existing knowledge concerning the topic of a critical response essay is crucial in facilitating the process of critical reading. In turn, the generation of answers to three guiding questions occurs concurrently throughout the close reading of an assigned text or other essay topics .

2. Techniques of Critical Reading

Previewing, reading, and summarizing are the main methods of critical reading. Basically, previewing a text allows readers to develop some familiarity with the content of a critical response essay, which they gain through exposure to content cues, publication facts, important statements, and authors’ backgrounds. In this case, readers may take notes of questions that emerge in their minds and possible biases related to prior knowledge. Then, reading has two distinct stages: first reading and rereading and annotating. Also, students read an assigned text at an appropriate speed for the first time with minimal notetaking. After that, learners reread a text to identify core and supporting ideas, key terms, and connections or implied links between ideas while making detailed notes. Lastly, writers summarize their readings into the main points by using their own words to extract the meaning and deconstruct critical response essays into meaningful parts.

3. Creating a Critical Response

Up to this point, source analysis is a blanket term that represents the entire process of developing a critical response. Mainly, the creation of a critical response essay involves analysis, interpretation, and synthesis, which occur as distinct activities. In this case, students analyze their readings by breaking down texts into elements with distilled meanings and obvious links to a thesis statement . During analysis, writers may develop minor guiding questions under first and second guiding questions, which are discipline-specific. Then, learners focus on interpretations of elements to determine their significance to an assigned text as a whole, possible meanings, and assumptions under which they may exist. Finally, authors of critical response essays create connections through the lens of relevant pre-existing knowledge, which represents a version of the element’s interconnection that they perceive to be an accurate depiction of a text.

Writing Steps of a Critical Response Essay

Step 1: pre-writing, a. analysis of writing situation.

Purpose. Before a student begins writing a critical response essay, he or she must identify the main reason for communication to the audience by using a formal essay format. Basically, the primary purposes of writing a critical response essay are explanation and persuasion. In this case, it is not uncommon for two purposes to overlap while writing a critical response essay. However, one of the purposes is usually dominant, which implies that it plays a dominant role in the wording, evidence selection, and perspective on a topic. In turn, students should establish their purposes in the early stages of the writing process because the purpose has a significant effect on the essay writing approach.

Audience. Students should establish a good understanding of the audience’s expectations, characteristics, attitudes, and knowledge in anticipation of the writing process. Basically, learning the audience’s expectations enables authors to meet the organizational demands, ‘burden of proof,’ and styling requirements. In college writing, it is the norm for all essays to attain academic writing standards. Then, the interaction between characteristics and attitudes forces authors to identify a suitable voice, which is appreciative of the beliefs and values of the audience. Lastly, writers must consider the level of knowledge of the audience while writing a critical response essay because it has a direct impact on the context, clarity, and readability of a paper. Consequently, a critical response essay for classmates is quite different from a paper that an author presents to a multi-disciplinary audience.

Define a topic. Topic selection is a critical aspect of the prewriting stage. Ideally, assignment instructions play a crucial role in topic selection, especially in higher education institutions. For example, when writing a critical response essay, instructors may choose to provide students with a specific article or general instructions to guide learners in the selection of relevant reading sources. Also, students may not have opportunities for independent topic selection in former circumstances. However, by considering the latter assignment conditions, learners may need to identify a narrow topic to use in article selection. Moreover, students should take adequate time to do preliminary research, which gives them a ‘feel’ of the topic, for example, 19th-century literature. Next, writers narrow down the scope of the topic based on their knowledge and interests, for example, short stories by black female writers from the 19 th century.

B. Research and Documentation

Find sources. Once a student has a topic, he or she can start the process of identifying an appropriate article. Basically, choosing a good source for writing a critical response essay occurs is much easier when aided with search tools on the web or university repository. In this case, learners select keywords or other unique qualities of an article and develop a search filter. Moreover, authors review abstracts or forewords of credible sources to determine their suitability based on their content. Besides content, other factors constrain the article selection process: the word count for a critical response essay and a turnaround time. In turn, if an assignment has a fixed length of 500 words and a turnaround time of one week, it is not practical to select a 200-page source despite content suitability.

Content selection. The process of selecting appropriate content from academic sources relies heavily on the purpose of a critical response essay. Basically, students must select evidence that they will include in a paper to support their claims in each paragraph. However, writers tend to let a source speak through the use of extensive quotations or summaries, which dilutes a synthesis aspect of a critical response essay. Instead, learners should take a significant portion of time to identify evidence from reliable sources , which are relevant to the purpose of an essay. Also, a student who is writing a critical analysis essay to disagree with one or more arguments will select different pieces of evidence as compared to a person who is writing to analyze the overall effectiveness of the work.

Annotated bibliography. An annotated bibliography is vital to the development of a critical response essay because it enables authors to document useful information that they encounter during research. During research and documentation stages for a critical response essay, annotated bibliographies contain the main sources for a critical analysis essay and other sources that contribute to the knowledge base of an author, even though these sources will not appear in reference lists. Mostly, a critical response essay has only one source. However, an annotated bibliography contains summaries of other sources, which may inform the author’s critical response through the development of a deep understanding of a topic. In turn, an annotated bibliography is quite useful when an individual is writing a critical response to an article on an unfamiliar topic.

Step 2: Writing a Critical Response Essay

A. organization..

Thesis . A thesis statement sentence is a crucial component of a critical response essay because it presents the student’s purpose, argument, and the conclusion that he or she draws from the textual evidence. Also, the thesis statement is the response to the thesis question, which an author creates from assignment instructions. After completing the research stage, students can develop a tentative thesis statement to act as a starting point for the writing stage. Usually, tentative thesis statements undergo numerous revisions during the writing stage, which is a consequence of the refinement of the main idea during the drafting.

Weigh the evidence. Based on the tentative thesis, an author evaluates the relative importance of collected pieces of textual evidence to the central idea. Basically, students should distinguish between general and specific ideas to ascertain that there exists a logical sequence of presentation, which the audience can readily grasp. Firstly, for writing a critical response essay, learners should identify general ideas and establish specific connections that exist between each general idea and specific details, which support a central claim. Secondly, writers should consider some implications of ideas as they conduct a sorting process and remove evidence that does not fit. Moreover, students fill ‘holes’ that are present due to the lack of adequate supporting evidence to conclude this stage.

Create an outline. An essay outline is a final product of weighing the significance of the evidence in the context of the working thesis statement. In particular, a formal outline is a preferred form of essay structure for a critical response essay because it allows for detailed documentation of ideas while maintaining a clear map of connections. During the formation of an outline, students use a systematic scheme of indentation and labeling all the parts of an outline structure. In turn, this arrangement ensures that elements that play the same role are readily discernible at a glance, for example, primary essay divisions, secondary divisions, principle supporting points, and specific details.

Drafting. The drafting step involves the conversion of the one-sentence ideas in an outline format into complete paragraphs and, eventually, a critical response essay. In this case, there is no fixed approach to writing the first draft. Moreover, students should follow a technique that they find effective in overcoming the challenge of starting to write a critical response essay. Nonetheless, it is good practice to start writing paragraphs that authors believe are more straightforward to include regardless of specific positions that they hold on an outline. In turn, learners should strive to write freely and be open to new ideas despite the use of an outline. During drafting, the conveyance of meaning is much more important than the correctness of the draft.

Step 3: Post-Writing

Individual revision. An individual revision process focuses on the rethinking and rewriting of a critical response essay to improve the meaning and structure of a paper. Essentially, students try to review their papers from a perspective of readers to ensure that the level of detail, relationship and arrangement of paragraphs, and the contribution of the minor ideas to the thesis statement attain the desired effect. In this case, the use of a checklist improves the effectiveness of individual revision. Moreover, a checklist contains 12 main evaluation categories: assignment, purpose, audience and voice, genre, thesis, organization, development, unity, coherence, title, introduction, and conclusion.

Collaborative revision. Collaborative revision is a revision strategy that covers subconscious oversight that occurs during individual revision. During an individual revision of a critical response essay, authors rely on self-criticism, which is rarely 100% effective because writers hold a bias that their works are of high quality. Therefore, subjecting an individual’s work to peer review allows students to collect critique from an actual reader who may notice problems that an author may easily overlook. In turn, learners may provide peer reviewers with a checklist to simplify the revision process.

Editing . The editing step requires authors to examine the style, clarity, and correctness of a critical response essay. In particular, students review their papers to ascertain their conformance with the guidelines of formal essay writing and the English language. Moreover, sentence fragments, subject-verb agreement, dangling modifiers, incorrect use of punctuation, vague pronoun references, and parallelism are common grammar issues that learners eliminate during editing. Then, writers confirm that their critical response essays adhere to referencing style guidelines for citation and formatting, such as the inclusion of a title page, appropriate in-text citation, and proper styling of bibliographic information in the reference list. In turn, students must proofread a critical response essay repeatedly until they find all errors because such mistakes may divert the audience’s attention from the content of a paper.

Sample Outline Template for a Critical Response Essay

I. Introduction

A. Summary of an article. B. Thesis statement.

A. First body paragraph

• The idea for the first paragraph.
• Evidence for the first point from an article.
• Interpretation of the evidence.

B. Second body paragraph

• The idea for the second paragraph.
• Evidence for the second point from an article.

C. Third body paragraph

• The idea for the third paragraph.
• Evidence for the third point from an article.

III. Conclusion

A. Summary of three points that form a body section. B. Closing remarks.

Uniqueness of a Critical Response Essay Outline

The presence of a summary in the introduction and an interpretation for each piece of evidence are defining features of a critical response essay. Typically, the introduction, being one of 5 parts of an essay , does not contain a succinct summary of a source that an author uses in body paragraphs. In this case, the incorporation of a summary in the introduction paragraph provides the audience with specific information concerning the target article of a critical response. Specifically, a critical response essay differs from other response papers because it emphasizes the provision of reasonable judgments of a text rather than the testing and defense of one’s judgments. In turn, authors of a critical response essay do not provide evaluation for their judgments, which implies that critical responses may be different but correct if a specific interpretation is reasonable to the audience.

Expanding an Outline Format Into a Critical Response Essay

1. introduction.

The introductory paragraph in a critical response essay consists of two primary sections: a summary of an article and a thesis statement. Firstly, a summary of an article consists of the text’s central argument and the purpose of the presentation of the argument. Basically, students should strive to distill the main idea and purpose of the text into a few sentences because the length of the introduction is approximately 10% of the essay’s word count. Then, a summary provides the audience with adequate background information concerning an article, which forms a foundation for announcing the student’s primary idea. In this case, writers may include an additional sentence between a summary and a thesis statement to establish a smooth flow in the opening paragraph. However, learners should not quote thesis and purpose statements because it results in a fragmented introduction, which is unappealing to readers and ineffective.

• All body paragraphs have in a critical response essay four main elements: the writer’s idea, meaningful evidence from a reading text, interpretation of the evidence, and a concluding statement.

A. Writer’s Idea

The writer’s idea for a paragraph appears in the first sentence of a paragraph, which is a topic sentence. For example, if students know how to write a topic sentence , they present readers with a complete and distinct idea that proves or supports a thesis statement. In this case, authors should carefully word their topic sentences to ensure that there is no unnecessary generalization or spillovers of ideas from other paragraphs. Notably, all the topic sentences in the body of a critical response essay share a logical relationship that allows the audience to easily follow the development of the central idea of a paper.

B. Evidence

Students should provide evidence that supports the idea that they propose in the topic sentence. Basically, the evidence for all body paragraphs is the product of critical reading of an article, which allows writers to identify meaningful portions of a text. During the presentation of evidence, learners should ascertain that the contextual meaning of paraphrases or quotations is not lost because such a strategy will harm interpretations that follow after it. In turn, critical response essays must not contain lengthy or numerous quotations unless the meaning or intended effect of a quotation is not replicable upon paraphrasing.

C. Interpretation.

Interpretation segments of paragraphs allow authors to explain the significance of the evidence to the topic sentence. In a critical response essay, the interpretation is the equivalent of an author revealing the possible assumptions behind a text paraphrase and commenting on whether or not he or she finds them reasonable. Moreover, students make inferences concerning their meaning in the context of the entire narrative and its relation to the paragraph’s idea. In turn, learners should refrain from reading too much into a piece of evidence because it may result in false or unreasonable inferences.

D. Concluding Sentence

The concluding statement is the final sentence of any paragraph. In this case, the primary role of the concluding sentence is to emphasize the link between the topic sentence, evidence, interpretation, and the essay’s central idea. Also, the concluding statement should not contain an in-text citation because it does not introduce new evidence to support the topic sentence. Therefore, authors use concluding sentences to maintain the unity between body paragraphs and a critical response essay in its entirety.

3. Conclusion

The conclusion comprises of three core elements: a restatement of a thesis statement, a summary of the main points that authors present in body paragraphs, and closing remarks. In particular, the first statement of the conclusion draws the attention of the audience to the central idea, which an author proposes in a thesis statement. Then, students review the main points of a critical response essay to demonstrate that written arguments in body paragraphs adequately support a thesis statement. Moreover, writers should summarize the main points of a paper in the same order that they appear in the main part to guarantee that logical pattern in the body is readily discernible in summary. Finally, learners make their closing remarks, which creates a sense of wholesomeness in a critical response essay or ties a paper to a larger relevant discourse.

Example of Writing a Critical Response Essay

Topic: American Capitalism: The New Face of Slavery

I. Sample Introduction of a Critical Response Essay

Capitalism is a dominant characteristic of the American economy. In this case, Matthew Desmond’s article “In Order to Understand the Brutality of American Capitalism, You Have to Start on the Plantation” discusses the role of slavery in shaping contemporary business practices. Specifically, the author attempts to convince the audience that the brutality of American capitalism originates from slavery. In turn, Desmond lays a strong but simple foundation for his argument, which ensures that the audience can conceptualize the link between plantation slavery and contemporary American capitalistic practices.

II. Example of a Body in a Critical Response Essay

A. example of the first body paragraph: american capitalism.

Early in the article, Desmond informs readers of the high variability in the manifestation of capitalism in societies, which creates the impression that American capitalism is a choice. For example, Desmond (2019) argues that the brutality of American capitalism is simply one of the possible outcomes of a society built on capitalistic principles because other societies implement the same principles in a manner that is liberating, protective, and democratic. Moreover, Desmond begins his argument by eliminating a popular presumption that exploitation and oppression are unavoidable outcomes of capitalism. In turn, this strategic move to establish this fact is in the introductory section of the article because it invites the audience to rethink the meaning of capitalism. Furthermore, its plants doubt regarding the ‘true’ meaning of capitalism outside the context of American society.

B. Example of the Second Body Paragraph: American Capitalism: Slavery and American’s Economic Growth

After establishing that the perception of capitalism through the lens of American society has some bias, Desmond proceeds to provide detailed evidence to explain the attempt to camouflage the obvious link between slavery and America’s economic growth. For instance, Desmond (2019) notes the role of Alfred Chandler’s book, The Visible Hand, and Caitlin Rosenthal’s book, Accounting for Slavery, in breaking the link between management practices in plantations and modern corporations by suggesting that the current business practices are a consequence of the 19th-century railroad industry. In this case, Desmond uses this evidence to make a logical appeal to the audience, which makes his argument more convincing because he explains the reason behind the exclusion of slavery in the discourse on modern industry. As a result, Desmond dismisses one of the main counterarguments against his central argument, which increases his persuasive power.

C. Example of the Third Body Paragraph: Input vs. Output Dynamic

Desmond emphasizes the link between slavery and American capitalism to readers by using the simple input vs. output dynamic throughout the article. For example, Desmond (2019) compares the Plantation Record and Account Book to the heavy digital surveillance techniques in modern workplaces because they collect data, which the employers use to maximize productivity while minimizing inputs. In particular, the comparison reveals that employers did not stop the practice of reducing laborers into units of production with fixed productivity thresholds. Moreover, the constant repetition of the theme of low input and high output dominates the body paragraphs, which makes it nearly impossible for readers to lose sight of the link between slavery and business practices under American capitalism. In turn, the simplification of the underlying logic in Desmond’s argument ensures its clarity to the audience.

III. Sample Conclusion of a Critical Response Essay

Desmond carefully plans the presentation of his argument to the audience, which allows readers to follow the ideas easily. In particular, the author starts with a call for readers to set aside any presumptions concerning capitalism and its origin. Then, Desmond provides the audience with an alternative narrative with support from seminal texts in slavery and economics. On the whole, Desmond manages to convince the audience that the American capitalistic society is merely a replica rather than an aberration of slavery.

Citing Sources in a Critical Response Essay

A critical response essay contains specific thoughts of the article’s author and direct words of the text’s author. In this case, students must conduct proper documentation to ensure that readers of critical response essays can distinguish between these two types of ‘voices.’ Moreover, documentation prevents incidents of plagiarism. Usually, instructors mention a referencing technique that students should use in writing a critical response essay. However, if assignment instructions do not identify a specific documentation style, writers should use a referencing technique that is acceptable for scholarly writing in their disciplines.

In-text citation:

• Parenthetical: (Desmond, 2019).
• Narrative: Desmond (2019).
• Desmond, M. (2019, August 12). In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation . New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html
• Parenthetical: (Desmond par. 1).
• Narrative: Desmond argues . . . (par. 1).

Works Cited:

• Desmond, Matthew. “In Order to Understand the Brutality of American Capitalism, You Have to Start on the Plantation.” New York Times , 14 Aug. 2019, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html.

3. Harvard Referencing

• Parenthetical: (Desmond 2019).

Reference List:

• Desmond, M 2019, In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation . Available from: <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html>. [27 August 2020].

4. Chicago/Turabian

In-text citation (footnote):

• 1. Matthew Desmond, “In Order to Understand the Brutality of American Capitalism, You Have to Start on the Plantation,” New York Times, August 14, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html.

Bibliography:

• Desmond, Matthew. “In Order to Understand the Brutality of American Capitalism, You Have to Start on the Plantation.” New York Times. August 14, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html.

Final Provisions on a Critical Response Essay

• Critical reading is a precursor for writing an effective critical response essay.
• Students must conduct adequate research on a topic to develop a proper understanding of a theme, even if only one article appears on the reference list.
• Notetaking or annotation is a good practice that aids students in extracting meaning from an article.
• Writers should plan for all activities in the writing process to ascertain that they have adequate time to move through all the stages.
• An outline is an organizational tool, which learners must use to establish the sequence of ideas in a critical response essay.
• The purpose of a critical response essay has a significant impact on the selection of evidence and the arrangement of body paragraphs.
• Students should prioritize revision and editing, which represent opportunities to refine the content of an essay and remove mechanical issues.
• Collaborative and individual revision are equally important because they play different roles in the writing of a critical response essay.
• Evidence selection is dependent on the purpose and thesis statement of a critical response essay.

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10.1: Reader-Response Criticism

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We have examined many schools of literary criticism. Here you will find an in-depth look at one of them: Reader-Response.

The Purpose of Reader-Response

• why you like or dislike the text;
• explain whether you agree or disagree with the author;
• identify the text’s purpose; and
• critique the text.

Write as a Scholar

Criticize with examples.

• Is the text racist?
• Does the text unreasonably puts down things, such as religion, or groups of people, such as women or adolescents, conservatives or democrats, etc?
• Does the text include factual errors or outright lies? It is too dark and despairing? Is it falsely positive?
• Is the text poorly written?
• Does it contain too much verbal “fat”?
• Is it too emotional or too childish?
• Does it have too many facts and figures?
• Are there typos or other errors in the text?
• Do the ideas wander around without making a point?

In each of these cases, do not simply criticize, but give examples. As a beginning scholar, be cautious of criticizing any text as “confusing” or “crazy,” since readers might simply conclude that  you  are too ignorant or slow to understand and appreciate it.

The Structure of a Reader-Response Essay

• title of the work to which you are responding;
• the author; and
• the main thesis of the text.
• What does the text have to do with you, personally, and with your life (past, present or future)? It is not acceptable to write that the text has NOTHING to do with you, since just about everything humans can write has to do in some way with every other human.
• How much does the text agree or clash with your view of the world, and what you consider right and wrong?  Use several quotes as examples of how it agrees with and supports what you think about the world, about right and wrong, and about what you think it is to be human.   Use quotes and examples to discuss how the text disagrees with what you think about the world and about right and wrong.
• What did you learn, and how much were your views and opinions challenged or changed by this text, if at all?   Did the text communicate with you? Why or why not?   Give examples of how your views might have changed or been strengthened (or perhaps, of why the text failed to convince you, the way it is). Please do not write “I agree with everything the author wrote,” since everybody disagrees about something, even if it is a tiny point. Use quotes to illustrate your points of challenge, or where you were persuaded, or where it left you cold.
• How well does the text address things that you, personally, care about and consider important to the world?   How does it address things that are important to your family, your community, your ethnic group, to people of your economic or social class or background, or your faith tradition?  If not, who does or did the text serve? Did it pass the “Who cares?” test?   Use quotes from the text to illustrate.
• What can you praise about the text? What problems did you have with it?  Reading and writing “critically” does not mean the same thing as “criticizing,” in everyday language (complaining or griping, fault-finding, nit-picking). Your “critique” can and should be positive and praise the text if possible, as well as pointing out problems, disagreements and shortcomings.
• How well did you enjoy the text (or not) as entertainment or as a work of art?  Use quotes or examples to illustrate the quality of the text as art or entertainment. Of course, be aware that some texts are not meant to be entertainment or art: a news report or textbook, for instance, may be neither entertaining or artistic, but may still be important and successful.
• your overall reaction to the text;
• whether you would read something else like this in the future;
• whether you would read something else by this author; and
• if would you recommend read this text to someone else and why.

Key Takeaways

• In reader-response, the reader is essential to the meaning of a text for they bring the text to life.
• The purpose of a reading response is examining, explaining, and defending your personal reaction to a text.
• When writing a reader-response, write as an educated adult addressing other adults or fellow scholars.
• As a beginning scholar, be cautious of criticizing any text as “boring,” “crazy,” or “dull.”  If you do criticize, base your criticism on the principles and form of the text itself.
• The challenge of a reader-response is to show how you connected with the text.

Reader-Response Essay Example

To Misread or to Rebel: A Woman’s Reading of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”

At its simplest, reading is “an activity that is guided by the text; this must be processed by the reader who is then, in turn, affected by what he has processed” (Iser 63). The text is the compass and map, the reader is the explorer. However, the explorer cannot disregard those unexpected boulders in the path which he or she encounters along the journey that are not written on the map. Likewise, the woman reader does not come to the text without outside influences. She comes with her experiences as a woman—a professional woman, a divorcée, a single mother. Her reading, then, is influenced by her experiences. So when she reads a piece of literature like “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber, which paints a highly negative picture of Mitty’s wife, the woman reader is forced to either misread the story and accept Mrs. Mitty as a domineering, mothering wife, or rebel against that picture and become angry at the society which sees her that way.

Due to pre-existing sociosexual standards, women see characters, family structures, even societal structures from the bottom as an oppressed group rather than from a powerful position on the top, as men do. As Louise Rosenblatt states: a reader’s “tendency toward identification [with characters or events] will certainly be guided by our preoccupations at the time we read. Our problems and needs may lead us to focus on those characters and situations through which we may achieve the satisfactions, the balanced vision, or perhaps merely the unequivocal motives unattained in our own lives” (38). A woman reader who feels chained by her role as a housewife is more likely to identify with an individual who is oppressed or feels trapped than the reader’s executive husband is. Likewise, a woman who is unable to have children might respond to a story of a child’s death more emotionally than a woman who does not want children. However, if the perspective of a woman does not match that of the male author whose work she is reading, a woman reader who has been shaped by a male-dominated society is forced to misread the text, reacting to the “words on the page in one way rather than another because she operates according to the same set of rules that the author used to generate them” (Tompkins xvii). By accepting the author’s perspective and reading the text as he intended, the woman reader is forced to disregard her own, female perspective. This, in turn, leads to a concept called “asymmetrical contingency,” described by Iser as that which occurs “when Partner A gives up trying to implement his own behavioral plan and without resistance follows that of Partner B. He adapts himself to and is absorbed by the behavioral strategy of B” (164). Using this argument, it becomes clear that a woman reader (Partner A) when faced with a text written by a man (Partner B) will most likely succumb to the perspective of the writer and she is thus forced to misread the text. Or, she could rebel against the text and raise an angry, feminist voice in protest.

James Thurber, in the eyes of most literary critics, is one of the foremost American humorists of the 20th century, and his short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is believed to have “ushered in a major [literary] period … where the individual can maintain his self … an appropriate way of assaulting rigid forms” (Elias 432). The rigid form in Thurber’s story is Mrs. Mitty, the main character’s wife. She is portrayed by Walter Mitty as a horrible, mothering nag. As a way of escaping her constant griping, he imagines fantastic daydreams which carry him away from Mrs. Mitty’s voice. Yet she repeatedly interrupts his reveries and Mitty responds to her as though she is “grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in the crowd” (286). Not only is his wife annoying to him, but she is also distant and removed from what he cares about, like a stranger. When she does speak to him, it seems reflective of the way a mother would speak to a child. For example, Mrs. Mitty asks, “‘Why don’t you wear your gloves? Have you lost your gloves?’ Walter Mitty reached in a pocket and brought out the gloves. He put them on, but after she had turned and gone into the building and he had driven on to a red light, he took them off again” (286). Mrs. Mitty’s care for her husband’s health is seen as nagging to Walter Mitty, and the audience is amused that he responds like a child and does the opposite of what Mrs. Mitty asked of him. Finally, the clearest way in which Mrs. Mitty is portrayed as a burdensome wife is at the end of the piece when Walter, waiting for his wife to exit the store, imagines that he is facing “the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last” (289). Not only is Mrs. Mitty portrayed as a mothering, bothersome hen, but she is ultimately described as that which will be the death of Walter Mitty.

Mrs. Mitty is a direct literary descendant of the first woman to be stereotyped as a nagging wife, Dame Van Winkle, the creation of the American writer, Washington Irving. Likewise, Walter Mitty is a reflection of his dreaming predecessor, Rip Van Winkle, who falls into a deep sleep for a hundred years and awakes to the relief of finding out that his nagging wife has died. Judith Fetterley explains in her book, The Resisting Reader, how such a portrayal of women forces a woman who reads “Rip Van Winkle” and other such stories “to find herself excluded from the experience of the story” so that she “cannot read the story without being assaulted by the negative images of women it presents” (10). The result, it seems, is for a woman reader of a story like “Rip Van Winkle” or “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” to either be excluded from the text, or accept the negative images of women the story puts forth. As Fetterley points out, “The consequence for the female reader is a divided self. She is asked to identify with Rip and against herself, to scorn the amiable sex and act just like it, to laugh at Dame Van Winkle and accept that she represents ‘woman,’ to be at once both repressor and repressed, and ultimately to realize that she is neither” (11). Thus, a woman is forced to misread the text and accept “woman as villain.” as Fetterley names it, or rebel against both the story and its message.

So how does a woman reader respond to this portrayal of Mrs. Mitty? If she were to follow Iser’s claim, she would defer to the male point of view presented by the author. She would sympathize with Mitty, as Thurber wants us to do, and see domineering women in her own life that resemble Mrs. Mitty. She may see her mother and remember all the times that she nagged her about zipping up her coat against the bitter winter wind. Or the female reader might identify Mrs. Mitty with her controlling mother-in-law and chuckle at Mitty’s attempts to escape her control, just as her husband tries to escape the criticism and control of his own mother. Iser’s ideal female reader would undoubtedly look at her own position as mother and wife and would vow to never become such a domineering person. This reader would probably also agree with a critic who says that “Mitty has a wife who embodies the authority of a society in which the husband cannot function” (Lindner 440). She could see the faults in a relationship that is too controlled by a woman and recognize that a man needs to feel important and dominant in his relationship with his wife. It could be said that the female reader would agree completely with Thurber’s portrayal of the domineering wife. The female reader could simply misread the text.

Or, the female reader could rebel against the text. She could see Mrs. Mitty as a woman who is trying to do her best to keep her husband well and cared for. She could see Walter as a man with a fleeting grip on reality who daydreams that he is a fighter pilot, a brilliant surgeon, a gun expert, or a military hero, when he actually is a poor driver with a slow reaction time to a green traffic light. The female reader could read critics of Thurber who say that by allowing his wife to dominate him, Mitty becomes a “non-hero in a civilization in which women are winning the battle of the sexes” (Hasley 533) and become angry that a woman’s fight for equality is seen merely as a battle between the sexes. She could read Walter’s daydreams as his attempt to dominate his wife, since all of his fantasies center on him in traditional roles of power. This, for most women, would cause anger at Mitty (and indirectly Thurber) for creating and promoting a society which believes that women need to stay subservient to men. From a male point of view, it becomes a battle of the sexes. In a woman’s eyes, her reading is simply a struggle for equality within the text and in the world outside that the text reflects.

It is certain that women misread “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” I did. I found myself initially wishing that Mrs. Mitty would just let Walter daydream in peace. But after reading the story again and paying attention to the portrayal of Mrs. Mitty, I realized that it is imperative that women rebel against the texts that would oppress them. By misreading a text, the woman reader understands it in a way that is conventional and acceptable to the literary world. But in so doing, she is also distancing herself from the text, not fully embracing it or its meaning in her life. By rebelling against the text, the female reader not only has to understand the point of view of the author and the male audience, but she also has to formulate her own opinions and create a sort of dialogue between the text and herself. Rebelling against the text and the stereotypes encourages an active dialogue between the woman and the text which, in turn, guarantees an active and (most likely) angry reader response. I became a resisting reader.

Works Cited

Elias, Robert H. “James Thurber: The Primitive, the Innocent, and the Individual.”  Contemporary Literary Criticism . Vol. 5. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980. 431–32. Print.

Fetterley, Judith.  The Resisting Reader . Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978. Print.

Hasley, Louis. “James Thurber: Artist in Humor.”  Contemporary Literary Criticism . Vol. 11. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980. 532–34. Print.

Iser, Wolfgang.  The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981. Print.

Lindner, Carl M. “Thurber’s Walter Mitty—The Underground American Hero.”  Contemporary Literary Criticism . Vol. 5. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980. 440–41. Print.

Rosenblatt, Louise M.  Literature as Exploration . New York: MLA, 1976. Print.

Thurber, James. “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”  Literature: An Introduction to Critical Reading . Ed. William Vesterman. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1993. 286–89. Print.

Tompkins, Jane P. “An Introduction to Reader-Response Criticism.”  Reader Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism . Ed. Jane P. Tompkins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. ix-xxvi. Print.

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Definition of response

answer , response , reply , rejoinder , retort mean something spoken, written, or done in return.

answer implies the satisfying of a question, demand, call, or need.

response may imply a quick or spontaneous reaction to a person or thing that serves as a stimulus.

reply often suggests a thorough response to all issues, points, or questions raised.

rejoinder can be a response to a reply or to an objection.

retort implies a reaction to an implicit or explicit charge, criticism, or attack which contains a countercharge or counterattack.

Examples of response in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'response.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Middle English & Latin; Middle English respounce , from Anglo-French respuns, respounce , from Latin responsum reply, from neuter of responsus , past participle of respondēre

14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Phrases Containing response

• autonomous sensory meridian response
• auto response
• call - and - response
• counter - response
• direct - response
• frequency response
• galvanic skin response
• give / make no response
• immune response

Dictionary Entries Near response

response curve

Cite this Entry

“Response.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/response. Accessed 3 May. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of response, medical definition, medical definition of response, more from merriam-webster on response.

Nglish: Translation of response for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of response for Arabic Speakers

Britannica.com: Encyclopedia article about response

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Utilizing Extended Response Items to Enhance Student Learning

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"Extended response items" have traditionally been called "essay questions." An extended response item is an open-ended question that begins with some type of prompt. These questions allow students to write a response that arrives at a conclusion based on their specific knowledge of the topic. An extended response item takes considerable time and thought. It requires students not only to give an answer but also to explain the answer with as much in-depth detail as possible. In some cases, students not only have to give an answer and explain the answer, but they also have to show how they arrived at that answer.

Teachers love extended response items because they require students to construct an in-depth response that proves mastery or lack thereof. Teachers can then utilize this information to reteach gap concepts or build upon individual student strengths. Extended response items require students to demonstrate a higher depth of knowledge than they would need on a multiple choice item. Guessing is almost completely eliminated with an extended response item. A student either knows the information well enough to write about it or they do not. Extended response items also are a great way to assess and teach students grammar and writing. Students must be strong writers as an extended response item also tests a student's ability to write coherently and grammatically correct.

Extended response items require essential critical thinking skills. An essay, in a sense, is a riddle that students can solve using prior knowledge, making connections, and drawing conclusions. This is an invaluable skill for any student to have. Those who can master it have a better chance of being successful academically.  Any student who can successfully solve problems and craft well-written explanations of their solutions will be at the top of their class. 

Extended response items do have their shortcomings. They are not teacher friendly in that they are difficult to construct and score. Extended response items take a lot of valuable time to develop and grade. Additionally, they are difficult to score accurately. It can become difficult for teachers to remain objective when scoring an extended response item. Each student has a completely different response, and teachers must read the entire response looking for evidence that proves mastery. For this reason, teachers must develop an accurate rubric and follow it when scoring any extended response item.

An extended response assessment takes more time for students to complete than a multiple choice assessment . Students must first organize the information and construct a plan before they can actually begin responding to the item. This time-consuming process can take multiple class periods to complete depending on the specific nature of the item itself.

Extended response items can be constructed in more than one way. It can be passage-based, meaning that students are provided with one or more passages on a specific topic. This information can help them formulate a more thoughtful response. The student must utilize evidence from the passages to formulate and validate their response on the extended response item. The more traditional method is a straightforward, open-ended question on a topic or unit that has been covered in class. Students are not given a passage to assist them in constructing a response but instead must draw from memory their direct knowledge on the topic.

Teachers must remember that formulating a well written extended response is a skill in itself. Though they can be a great assessment tool, teachers must be prepared to spend the time to teach students how to write a formidable essay . This is not a skill that comes without hard work. Teachers must provide students with the multiple skills that are required to write successfully including sentence and paragraph structure, using proper grammar, pre-writing activities, editing, and revising. Teaching these skills must become part of the expected classroom routine for students to become proficient writers.

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What Does It Mean to Have a Child? We Should Be Taking That Question Seriously.

van der Lugt is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of St Andrews, where she specializes in early modern intellectual history and philosophy. She is the author of Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering and Begetting: What Does It Mean to Create a Child?

T he question of begetting —that is, to bring (a child) into existence by the process of reproduction—is one that we routinely ask each other. It is also a question that young people are asking themselves with increasing urgency, as many wonder if, in an age of climate crisis and existential uncertainty, it’s still OK to have kids. What does it mean to create another person, not knowing what their life will be like?

In response, every so often an article or essay is published to the extent that having children is an intrinsically hopeful act; that not to have them is to give in to despair ; that this is how we express gratitude for existence; that “the meaning of life is to pass it on.”

This is interesting—not just for what it suggests about begetting (that this is a question not up for consideration), but for what it suggests about hope and meaning; about our lives, and what it would mean for them to have purpose. We tend to speak in binaries such as light/dark, optimism/pessimism, hope/despair . Presenting the problem in this manner—where to beget is to be hopeful, while anything else is automatically the opposite—is to suggest a stark choice: either you are on the side of life, or you have already given up.

But is reality truly colored in such stark tones? Are our lives, our hearts, our motives?

Consider a person living through the through the atrocities of a global war, and yet expressing an indomitable gratitude “for everything.” Consider another, convinced that life is bad and non-existence preferable, who nevertheless comes to long for a child and does not keep themselves from creating it. Consider a third who, deeply in love with life, nevertheless believesit would be wrong to bring another person into it—a person liable to suffering; a person who has not asked to be created.

These examples are all real and point towards a simple truth: that the dichotomy is a false one. There are ways to be grateful for life that are compatible with not begetting; just as there are modes of grief and even despair of which begetting is the consequence. So, too, there are ways of being that command obedience to a calling—and it is intrinsic to the nature of a calling that one does not know in advance what one is called to do. The call may lead to begetting, but also, it may lead away from it.

Read More: Why So Many Women Are Waiting Longer to Have Kids

But more important than all these things is the simple fact that, as the late writer Hilary Mantel once posited in her memoir Giving Up the Ghost , “motives are seldom simple and never pure.” The person who found her belief in the immorality of procreation superseded by the longing to beget; the person who lived through dark times yet loved life; the person who loved life yet refused to beget—what does this prove, except that life is complicated and begetting is also?

If anything, what these examples show is that there are these tangles and complications that we are not seeing—there are ways of grounding hope and meaning to which our minds and hearts are closed.

Perhaps one loves the world while seeing, with open eyes, the shadows clinging to even the most privileged corners of creation. Perhaps one shudders to bring a frail thing into the reaches of such shadows. Perhaps one fears the world but feels a calling that cannot be answered except by an act of creation. Perhaps the calling leads elsewhere.

Read More: The Parents Who Regret Having Children

What I want to resist is the automatic assumption that one path and not another is called “hopeful,” that one path and not another is an expression of commitment and moral fervor—even, of gratitude. What I want to ask is: what would it mean for hope and meaning not to be inflected with optimism or with the strain of “positive thinking” that has cast so powerful a spell on modern culture? What would it mean to envision different grounds for perseverance, for activism even, and for hope itself—for it to be rooted not in positive expectations about the future, but in a commitment to value and justice? What would it mean to recognize creation for what it is, a golden shadowed thing, and form our hopes accordingly?

When I speak of shadows, some may think this goes without saying; surely we all know, have always known, that all of existence is like this?

But in truth they are all too easily disregarded. In an age when entrepreneurs are preparing to make “space babies,” for the sake of proving that procreation is possible outside of earth’s atmosphere—there, in the cold and dark of distant space, with no knowledge whatsoever of the risks in zero gravity to either mother or child—because humanity must be propagated, this forgetfulness can take terrifying forms. Is that then hope? To create, because creating is always the better road? Is that then meaning?

There is more to say about this, and more to think about, for all of us. But we can begin by resisting the temptation of painting the decision to beget along the lines of hope vs despair, which fails to do justice to the richness and complexity of our moral lives. We can begin by recognizing that people asking the question of begetting do so not out of shortsightedness but out of a deep sense that there is something worth asking here, something that is owed. The least we can do is take their question seriously. What does it mean to create a child?

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What is behind US college protests over Israel-Gaza war?

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What do the US campus protests mean for Joe Biden in November?

Thousands of students have rallied for Palestine, after hundreds of thousands of Democrats declined to vote for Biden in the primary

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The policies of Joe Biden and Democrats towards Israel, which have prompted thousands of students across the country to protest, could affect the youth vote for Biden and hurt his re-election chances, experts have warned, in what is already expected to be a tight election.

Thousands of students at universities across the US have joined with pro-Palestine rallies and, most recently, encampments, as Israel’s war in Gaza has killed more than 34,000 people.

Some of the protests began as a call to encourage universities to ditch investments in companies that provide weapons and equipment to the Israeli military. But as the Biden administration has continued to largely support Israel, the president has increasingly become a focus of criticism from young people. Polling shows that young Americans’ support for Biden has been chipped away since 2020.

With Biden narrowly trailing Trump in several key swing states, it’s a voting bloc the president can ill afford to lose.

“The real threat to Biden is that younger voters, especially college-educated voters, won’t turn out for him in the election,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history of education at the University of Pennsylvania.

“I wouldn’t expect that the protesters on campuses today are going to vote for Trump, almost none of them will. That’s not the danger here. The danger is much simpler: that they simply won’t vote.”

Turnout could be key to Biden winning November’s election, given the devotion of Trump’s base, and there are signs that Biden’s handling of the situation in Gaza is already costing him support.

In Wisconsin, which Biden won by just 21,000 votes in 2020, more than 47,000 people voted “uninstructed” in the state’s Democratic primary , as a protest against the government’s support for Israel. It came after more than 100,000 voters in Michigan’s Democratic primary cast ballots for “uncommitted” : Biden won the state by just 154,000 votes four years ago.

Biden triumphed in Pennsylvania by a similarly small margin, and average polling shows him currently trailing Trump in the state, albeit by less than two points. Protests at campuses at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pittsburgh probably have Biden’s campaign worried.

“In states like Pennsylvania, the margins are going to be so small, that it’s at least possible that a couple thousand people not turning out, or voting for one of the third-party candidates, could swing the election one way or the other,” Zimmerman said.

In April, a Harvard poll found that Biden leads Trump by eight percentage points among 18- to 29-year-olds, down from a 23-point lead Biden had at the same point in 2020. In the same survey, 51% of young Americans said they support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, while just 10% said they were opposed.

Just as worrying for the voting figures was the sentiments Harvard unearthed. Nearly 60% of 18-to 29-year-olds said the country is “off on the wrong track”. Only 9% believe things are “generally headed in the right direction”.

On Tuesday, even the College Democrats of America – a centrist, Biden-supporting organization – criticized their own party .

“Each day that Democrats fail to stand united for a permanent ceasefire, two-state solution, and recognition of a Palestinian state, more and more youth find themselves disillusioned with the party,” the group said in a statement.

The White House said that Biden had “reiterated his clear” opposition to Israel invading the Gaza city of Rafah, where about 1.4 million Palestinians are sheltering, in a call with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, over the weekend.

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The administration said Biden had also “reaffirmed his ironclad commitment to Israel’s security”. That came after Biden said he condemned “the antisemitic protests”, although the president added: “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”

Zimmerman said “the most obvious” precedent for student protests influencing an election was in 1968, when Lyndon B Johnson dropped his re-election campaign in the face of anti-Vietnam war protests. Those protests, which had begun in 1965, weren’t the only reason for Johnson’s dropping out of the Democratic primary , Zimmerman said, but played a major role.

The Vietnam-era movement grew to something much larger in scale than the current demonstrations, although with hundreds of students arrested so far, there is evidence the movement is growing, and according to National Students for Justice in Palestine, an advocacy group, there are more than 50 encampments at universities around the US.

“A heavy-handed response to protests is basically not going to put them down. It’s just going to increase the protests and strengthen them, because then it becomes a question of free speech,” said Ralph Young, a history professor at Temple University whose work has focused on protest movements in the US.

If the protests against Israel’s conduct – and against Biden’s ability or willingness to reel Israel in – continue, it will not be an issue for Trump. In a Gallup poll in March, 71% of Republicans said they approved of “the military action Israel has taken in Gaza”, compared with just 36% of Democrats.

“The main negativity on this is for the Democrats. What Biden needs in order to win is a very heavy turnout of Democrats. If he loses even 10% of the Democratic vote and even if that does not go to Trump, I think the chances are slim for Biden to get re-elected,” Young said.

“If there is a ceasefire, or if things ease up, then maybe cooler heads will prevail and things will settle down. Maybe then the protests will not have as much of an impact on the election. But the longer they go on, the more impact they will have.”

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College Protesters Make Divestment From Israel a Rallying Cry

The campaign is likely to have a negligible impact on the companies or Israel, but activists see divestment as a clear way to force colleges to take action on the issue.

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By Santul Nerkar

As they gathered near the guarded gates of Columbia University in Upper Manhattan on Tuesday, a hundred or so protesters began to chant: “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest.”

“Divest” is a demand that has been repeated, on banners, in editorials in student newspapers and during rallies that are sweeping across campuses now gripped by a wave of pro-Palestinian activism.

What it actually means has varied in scope, and level of detail. At Yale and Cornell, students have called on the universities to stop investing in weapons manufacturers. Columbia students are demanding the sale of holdings in funds and businesses that activists say are profiting from Israel’s invasion of Gaza, and the longer-term occupation of Palestinian lands — including Google, which has a large contract with the Israeli government, and Airbnb, which allows listings in Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank.

Researchers say the impact of any divestment would ultimately be negligible on the businesses and on Israel. They add that if universities give up votes as shareholders at the companies, divestment could even be counterproductive in pressuring companies to change their practices.

Universities have so far rebuffed exhortations to divest. Defenders of Israel say these calls are unfair to a country that is under threat of attack, and antisemitic because they target the only Jewish-majority nation in the world. That’s a long-running accusation against the “boycott, divestment, sanctions” movement targeting the country. But the pro-Palestinian activists, many of whom are Jewish, see divestment as a clear and achievable way to force colleges to take action on the issue, an important symbolic victory and one that would raise awareness of their concerns. They cite the success of past efforts, including how students in the 1980s lobbied their universities to divest from companies that did business in apartheid South Africa, as well as from fossil fuel companies.

“First and foremost, we want the effect to be for Columbia, because that’s what we have power over,” said Ray Guerrero, a graduate student at Columbia’s School of Public Health who is an organizer with Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a student-led movement. “But we hope this expands, so these companies understand what the ramifications are.”

South Africa is a precedent.

The universities facing these calls have enormous endowments, in the billions of dollars, that are invested across financial markets, in stocks, real-estate, and large investment funds.

Divesting, simply put, means selling holdings, often those that are objectionable.

One often-cited example took place in the 1980s, targeting companies that did business with South Africa, which was under apartheid rule. Columbia made headlines when it sold $39 million of stock it held in companies including Coca-Cola, Ford Motor and Mobil Oil following weeks of sit-in protests from students on its campus.

Other schools followed suit. In total, more than 150 universities divested from companies doing business in South Africa, part of a tapestry of penalties levied against the country.

Students today see parallels in the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Ariela Rosenzweig, a senior at Brown University who has called for the school to divest from companies tied to Israel, said she hoped the movement would lead to a cascading effect of not just universities but other parts of society withdrawing support for Israel.

“I’m a member of this community, and I don’t want this particular community to be profiting from apartheid, from war, from genocide,” she said, referring to Brown.

But compared with the 1980s, universities have less direct control over their investments, opting instead for asset managers to oversee portfolios, which are increasingly invested in private equity and hedge funds. Some university administrators have also made the point that very little — if any — of their endowments is actively invested in companies that could be linked to Israel.

“We are not going to actively or directly invest in any weapons manufacturers, arms manufacturers or defense contractors,” said Jane Dietze, the chief investment officer of Brown, at a November town hall, as reported by The Brown Daily Herald.

A wide range of companies are being targeted.

Last week The Cornell Daily Sun endorsed calls for the university to divest from arms manufacturers directly involved in Israel’s campaign.

“Cornell should in no way support a war that has been waged with callous disregard for civilian lives,” the paper wrote.

At Columbia, by comparison, students are calling for divestment of stakes in a number of companies that aren’t so directly involved in warfare, including Caterpillar, Google and Airbnb.

Caterpillar’s ties to Israel have been scrutinized for decades, and were heightened after 2003, when an armored bulldozer manufactured by the company for the Israeli military ran over the American pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie, crushing her to death, as she sought to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes in Gaza.

Google has faced fierce protests from some of its own employees over a contract with the Israeli government for cloud services, while Airbnb is on the list because it has offered listings to visitors in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, which are deemed illegal by many nations.

The amount of money being targeted isn’t a large share of what is publicly known about these endowments. The investments listed by Columbia University Apartheid Divest as objectionable amount to less than one-tenth of 1 percent of Columbia’s $13.6 billion endowment. The students are also demanding greater transparency from the university on its private holdings to get a better sense of its overall investment in Israel.

Also on the list is an investor whose holdings are more transparent: BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, which owns shares of virtually every publicly traded company through its exchange-traded funds.

Activists at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as those at Columbia have pointed to the asset manager’s holdings in weapons manufacturers as reasons to divest from its funds.

According to the website Weapon Free Funds, which calls on investors to get money out of weapons stocks, only around 3 percent of BlackRock’s Core S&P 500 ETF is invested in “military contractors,” including Raytheon and Boeing.

Caterpillar, Google and Airbnb did not respond to requests for comment. BlackRock declined to comment.

Does divestment work?

The answer depends on how you define success.

Witold Henisz, vice dean and faculty head of the environmental, social and governance initiative at Wharton Business School, said that if the goal of divestment is to achieve a particular social goal through changing company behavior, it is likely to fail.

Mr. Henisz pointed to research that has found little to no impact of university divestments on firm behavior. He added that if an organization like a university was selling its stake in a company against its values, the buyer would likely care less about the issue than the university would. In turn, that means the new stakeholder will exert less pressure on the company to change its practices on an issue like selling arms to Israel.

But he added that if the goal of divestment was more broadly defined as part of a coalition of efforts to change hearts and minds, then it could be successful.

“If the goal is to mobilize a movement, to demonstrate moral outrage, campaigns sometimes are effective,” Mr. Henisz said.

Nonetheless, pro-Palestinian activists say the movement to divest has as much to do with ending their institutions’ complicity in atrocities as it does with changing the behavior of companies.

“If Columbia’s investments are so small as to not make a material impact, then why do we have them at all?” said Vayne Ong, a second-year doctoral student in history at the university. “There should be zero dollars, period, invested in any kind of genocide.”

Colleges aren’t budging yet.

So far, universities have flatly refused to adjust their holdings in response to student agitation. Some administrators have met with students demanding divestment, but the overarching message has been that they will not alter their portfolios or sell assets linked to Israel.

In a statement released last week, Yale said that it would not be divesting from weapons manufacturing because it did not “meet the threshold of grave social injury” that was necessary for divestment, according to the school’s Corporation Committee on Investor Responsibility, or C.C.I.R. The school said it had offered to provide students an avenue to speak with trustees, but those talks fell through Sunday.

Other universities that have refused to divest from Israel include Michigan State — whose Board of Trustees said it would not consider divestment “of any kind" earlier this month — as well as the University of Michigan and American University .

Student protesters have submitted proposals of divestment to organizations like Yale’s C.C.I.R., which seeks to ensure that the school’s investments are made in an ethical way. But the decision ultimately falls to university boards and presidents. At Brown, such a committee recommended in 2020 that the university divest from certain companies that “profit from human rights abuses in Palestine,” but the university president, Christina Paxson, refused to move the proposal forward.

Santul Nerkar is a reporter covering business and sports. More about Santul Nerkar

Our Coverage of the U.S. Campus Protests

News and Analysis

President Biden broke days of silence to finally speak out on the unrest disrupting campuses  across the United States, denouncing violence and antisemitism even as he defended the right to peaceful dissent.

At the University of California, Los Angeles, police officers dismantled a pro-Palestinian encampment  and made arrests after a tense hourslong standoff with demonstrators.

Police officers in riot gear arrested pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Fordham University’s Manhattan campus , the third university in New York City to face mass arrests.

Choosing Anonymity:  In an online world, doxxing and other consequences have led many student protesters to obscure their identities by wearing masks and scarves. That choice has been polarizing .

Seeing Links to a Global Struggle:  In many student protesters’ eyes, the war in Gaza is linked to other issues , such as policing, mistreatment of Indigenous people, racism and climate change.

Ending the Unrest:  Across the nation, universities are looking for ways to quell the protests . Columbia has taken the spotlight after calling in the police twice , while Brown chose a different path .

A 63-Year-Old Career Activist:  Videos show Lisa Fithian, whom the police called a “professional agitator,” working alongside protesters at Columbia  who stormed Hamilton Hall.