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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.

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How to Write a Response Paper

• Writing Essays
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• English Grammar
• M.Ed., Education Administration, University of Georgia
• B.A., History, Armstrong State University

Most of the time when you are tasked with an essay about a book or article you've read for a class, you will be expected to write in a professional and impersonal voice. But the regular rules change a bit when you write a response paper.

A response (or reaction) paper differs from the formal review primarily in that it is written in the first person . Unlike in more formal writing, the use of phrases like "I thought" and "I believe" is encouraged in a response paper. 

You'll still have a thesis and will need to back up your opinion with evidence from the work, but this type of paper spotlights your individual reaction as a reader or viewer.

Read and Respond

Grace Fleming

For a response paper, you still need to write a formal assessment of the work you're observing (this could be anything created, such as a film, a work of art, a piece of music, a speech, a marketing campaign, or a written work), but you will also add your own personal reaction and impressions to the report.

The steps for completing a reaction or response paper are:

• Observe or read the piece for an initial understanding.
• Mark interesting pages with a sticky flag or take notes on the piece to capture your first impressions.
• Reread the marked pieces and your notes and stop to reflect often.
• Record your thoughts.
• Develop a thesis.
• Write an outline.
• Construct your essay.

It may be helpful to imagine yourself watching a movie review as you're preparing your outline. You will use the same framework for your response paper: a summary of the work with several of your own thoughts and assessments mixed in.

The First Paragraph

After you have established an outline for your paper, you need to craft the first draft of the essay using all the basic elements found in any strong paper, including a strong introductory sentence .

In the case of a reaction essay, the first sentence should contain both the title of the work to which you are responding and the name of the author.

The last sentence of your introductory paragraph should contain a thesis statement . That statement will make your overall opinion very clear.

Stating Your Opinion

There's no need to feel shy about expressing your own opinion in a position paper, even though it may seem strange to write "I feel" or "I believe" in an essay. 

In the sample here, the writer analyzes and compares the plays but also manages to express personal reactions. There's a balance struck between discussing and critiquing the work (and its successful or unsuccessful execution) and expressing a reaction to it.

Sample Statements

When writing a response essay, you can include statements like the following:

• I felt that
• In my opinion
• The reader can conclude that
• The author seems to
• I did not like
• This aspect didn't work for me because
• The images seemed to
• The author was [was not] successful in making me feel
• I was especially moved by
• I didn't understand the connection between
• It was clear that the artist was trying to
• The soundtrack seemed too
• My favorite part was...because

Tip : A common mistake in personal essays it to resort to insulting comments with no clear explanation or analysis. It's OK to critique the work you are responding to, but you still need to back up your feelings, thoughts, opinions, and reactions with concrete evidence and examples from the work. What prompted the reaction in you, how, and why? What didn't reach you and why?

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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.

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How to Write a Response Paper: Understanding the Basics

Writing a response paper is an important task for students. It allows them to critically analyze a text, express their thoughts and opinions, and improve their writing skills. In this comprehensive guide, our ‘ write my essay ’ experts will explore the basics of how to write a response paper, pre-writing steps, and crafting a winning introduction, body, and conclusion. So, let's dive in and discover a flawless response paper at the end!

Defining What is a Response Paper

A response paper is a written assignment that requires the student to read a text and respond to it by expressing their views on the topic. It can be a stand-alone assignment or part of a larger project. When writing a response paper, it is important to remember the audience you are writing for. Are you writing for your professor, classmates, or a broader audience? This will help you tailor your writing style and tone accordingly.

Moreover, this kind of academic assignment should not only summarize the text but also provide a critical analysis of its main arguments and ideas. It should demonstrate your understanding of the text and your ability to engage with it in a thoughtful and meaningful way.

Purpose of Crafting a Response Paper

Writing response papers aims to demonstrate your understanding of the text, give your opinions and thoughts, and provide evidence to support your claims. In addition, this type of paper can help you develop critical reading skills and formulate coherent arguments. By engaging with the text, you can identify its strengths and weaknesses, evaluate its claims, and form your own opinions about the topic.

Furthermore, crafting response paper examples can be a valuable exercise in self-reflection. It allows you to articulate your thoughts and feelings about a particular topic and can help you better understand your values and beliefs.

Types of Response Papers

There are various types of response papers, each with its own unique characteristics and requirements. These include:

• Personal response : Here, you express your personal opinions, thoughts, and emotions about the text. This type of paper allows you to engage with the text more personally and explore your reactions to it.
• Critical response : Involves analyzing, evaluating, and interpreting the text to provide a critique. This type of paper requires you to engage with the text more objectively and analytically, focusing on its strengths and weaknesses and providing evidence to support your claims.
• Research-based response : Research-based response paper examples involve using external sources to support your claims. This type of paper requires you to engage with the text and supplement your analysis with evidence from other sources, such as scholarly articles, books, or interviews.

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How to Write a Response Paper: Pre-Writing Steps

Before diving into the writing process, laying a strong foundation through effective pre-writing steps is crucial. These initial stages not only provide clarity and structure but also enhance the overall quality of your response. And if you aren’t sure how to write a reaction paper , these steps can also be employed for your assignment.

Carefully Read and Analyze the Text

The first step in response paper creation is to carefully read and analyze the text. This involves more than just reading the words on the page; it requires critical thinking and analysis. As you read, pay attention to the author's tone, style, and use of language. Highlight important points, take notes, and identify the author's main argument and themes. Consider the context in which the text was written and how it relates to contemporary issues.

For example, if you are reading a historical document, think about how it reflects the social and political climate of the time. If you are reading a work of fiction, consider how the characters and plot relate to larger themes and ideas. By carefully analyzing the text, you will be better equipped to write a thoughtful and insightful response.

Take Notes and Highlight Key Points

Another important step is to take notes while reading, as it helps you organize your thoughts and ideas. As you read through the text, jot down your reactions, questions, and observations. Highlight key points, evidence, and quotes that support the author's argument. This will make it easier to refer back to specific parts of the text when you are writing your response.

Additionally, taking notes can help you identify patterns and connections between different parts of the text. This can be especially helpful when you are trying to develop your thesis statement and outline.

Develop a Thesis Statement

A thesis statement is a central argument that you will be making in your paper. It should be clear and concise and provide direction for your essay. Your thesis statement should be based on your analysis of the text and should reflect your own perspective.

When developing your thesis statement, consider the main argument of the text and how you agree or disagree with it. Think about the evidence and examples that the author uses to support their argument and how you might use those same examples to support your own argument. Your thesis statement should be specific and focused and should guide the rest of your essay.

Create an Outline

If you want to unlock the most important tip on how to ace a response paper perfection, it lies in creating a well-organized outline. Identify key points, evidence, and arguments that you want to discuss and organize them into a well-written paper format. Your outline should include an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

Start by introducing the text and your thesis statement. In the body paragraphs, discuss your main points and provide evidence from the text to support your argument. Use quotes and examples to illustrate your points. In conclusion, summarize your main points and restate your thesis statement. In the following paragraphs, we'll delve deeper into writing each section with more details.

Actual Writing Process with a Response Paper Format

Now that you have completed the essential pre-writing steps, it's time to delve into the actual writing process of your paper. In this section of our comprehensive guide, we will explore how to start a response paper along with developing insightful body paragraphs and culminating in a powerful conclusion.

Engage the Reader In Your Introduction

The introduction is the first impression that your reader will have of your paper. It is important to make a good first impression, so you want to engage them right from the start. There are several ways to do this, such as providing context, using a hook, or starting with a rhetorical question.

For example, if you are writing a paper about the effects of social media on mental health, you might start with a hook like:

'Did you know that the average person spends over two hours a day on social media? That's more time than they spend exercising or socializing in person.' 

When working with your paper, this hook immediately grabs the reader's attention and makes them interested in learning more about your topic.

Provide Context and Background Information

Once you have engaged the reader, it's important to provide context for the text you are analyzing. This includes information like the author's name, the title of the work, and the publication date. This information helps the reader understand the context of the text and why it is important.

For example, if you are analyzing a poem by Maya Angelou, you would want to provide some background information about her life and work. You might mention that she was a civil rights activist and a prolific writer and that the poem you are analyzing was written in 1969, during a time of great social and political upheaval in the United States.

Present Your Thesis Statement

Finally, it's important to present your thesis statement in the introduction. The thesis statement is the main argument of your paper, and it should be presented clearly and concisely so that the reader knows exactly what your paper is about.

For instance, if you are crafting a response paper example about the effects of social media on mental health, your thesis statement might be something like:

'This paper argues that excessive use of social media can have negative effects on mental health, including increased anxiety, depression, and feelings of isolation.'

By presenting your thesis statement in the introduction, you are setting up the rest of your paper and giving the reader a roadmap for what to expect. This helps them stay focused and engaged throughout your paper.

Meanwhile, you can find out more about how to write an essay format and set the right referencing style for your assignment!

Crafting the Body

One key aspect of ensuring a well-structured and articulate paper is to utilize your typical response paper outline as a reliable roadmap. By following it, you can maintain focus, coherence, and logical flow throughout your response. Moreover, keep the following points in mind as you proceed with crafting the body of your response paper:

• Use evidence and examples from the text:
• Incorporate relevant quotes, statistics, or other evidence that supports your opinions and arguments.
• By using evidence from the text, you can strengthen your argument and demonstrate a deep understanding of the material.
• Analyze and interpret the text:
• Demonstrate your critical thinking skills by thoroughly analyzing and interpreting the text.
• Explain how the text relates to your thesis statement and overall argument.
• Provide a clear and concise response that showcases your knowledge and understanding of the material.
• Address counterarguments and alternative perspectives:
• Acknowledge and address opposing viewpoints to demonstrate your ability to consider different perspectives.
• Explain why your argument is stronger than the opposing viewpoint.
• Provide evidence to support your claim and solidify your stance.

Concluding Your Paper

In the conclusion of your response paper example, it is essential to consolidate your reactions, ideas, and arguments regarding the text. Summarize the key points discussed throughout your paper, drawing inferences whenever applicable. 

When uncertain about ​​ how to write a conclusion for a research paper , the first important rule is to refrain from introducing new ideas or reiterating information already presented in the introduction of your paper. Instead, provide a concise and coherent summary that encapsulates the essence of your response, leaving a lasting impression on the reader.

Response Paper Example

To show you how to write a response paper effectively, our essay writer has provided an amazing example below. It will inspire you and help you on your own learning journey. Get ready to explore new ideas and expand your knowledge with our response paper sample.

As we conclude this comprehensive guide on how to write a response paper, you have acquired the essential tools and knowledge to embark on your writing journey with confidence. With a firm grasp of pre-writing strategies, the art of crafting an engaging introduction, organizing a well-structured body, and understanding the significance of supporting arguments and addressing counter arguments with a good response paper example, you are poised to leave a lasting impression.

And if you ever find yourself struggling to find inspiration or facing challenges with any aspect of your essays, order essay online and take advantage of the opportunity to seek assistance from our professional writing service team. By trusting us with your college essays and ordering a response paper, you can confidently navigate your academic journey!

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What Response Essays Are and How to Tackle Them

Writing a response essay might seem like a challenging task at first. Firstly, you need to understand to a great extent what the study that you are responding to is talking about and then make sure that you write an insightful, true to the source essay about it. Even if you need to write a response essay as part of your homework for faculty studies or high school assignments or you want to exercise your argumentative skills, it might seem like a lot of work at first. However, having in mind a clear structure of your future response essay is essential.

Before beginning to go through the main structure points that you need to check when writing a response essay, there are some tips that you need to know and that will help you lay your thoughts on paper in a more efficient way. First of all, after reading the essay or the article that you are responding to, you need to settle on whether you want to attack the ideas presented in that article or to agree with them. Based on that, you will structure the components of your response essay. For example, if your response essay is talking about protecting the environment and you want to show your agreement with the ideas presented in the original essay, then you should build your response essay around the idea of consolidating the thoughts in the main source.

Secondly, it is important that your readers clearly understand your position after reading your response essay. This means that you need to expose all possible arguments which might strengthen or attack the ideas presented in the main article. In order for you to achieve a strong position, it might be helpful to also expose a personal experience that can be related to the topic you are writing an essay about. This will not only make your argument points stronger but will also help your readers empathize with your writing. Also, it is important that you keep in mind that your response essay should be a response to something you have read, something that is a hot topic at the moment in various social contexts or something that has been debated for a long time and you want to present a new approach to things.

You also have to keep in mind that the more knowledge you show to your audience in your response essay about the author and the topic that is being debated, the more credibility you will gain. Read some cause or effect essay topics to get inspired. This is why it is important to also present a context in your response essay, such as details about the author and the paper you are choosing to respond to. Finally, after debating the ideas of the original text, you can also choose to talk about the effectiveness of the source text. It can be about how the main paper managed to reach the audience, if the writing style was effective, and how the author you are responding to had chosen to expose their ideas.

If we were to summarize the main points you should keep in mind before starting to tackle the components of a response essay, these would be:

• Make sure to clearly expose your position regarding the article or paper you are responding to
• Don’t forget to expose the personal experiences or thoughts that might help you relate to the matter in question and your reader to empathize with your way of writing
• Prove that you have knowledge about the author of the main text and can put your response essay in a context
• Evaluate the main text’s effectiveness and how it managed to reach the audience

Get Started: Write an Introduction

One important thing when writing a response essay is the way you structure the introduction. This is one of the key parts of your essay, as it embodies the topic you are about to debate and the premises you are basing your essay on. The introduction will make your audience decide if they want to keep reading your response essay or not. This is why it is important that you keep in mind the following tips:

• Introduction is all about catching your audience’s attention
• It should provide a brief description of the topic
• You should be able to briefly summarize your thesis
• Don’t forget to give a short description of the author and the article you are responding to

It might be the case that the source article that you are about to discuss contains several parts or has different ideas which can be debated and your response article refers only to a part of them. In this case, don’t forget to also mention this. Do not forget that you need to keep it short and catchy.

How to Make Your Introduction Catchy – Introduction Ideas

Writing a catchy introduction that will make your reader read the whole response article is challenging. This is why you will find here some ideas to start with, such as:

• Making use of a statistic: some puzzling conclusion that researchers might have reached at some point and which is relevant to the topic you are about to respond to.
• Citing someone who is related to the area of expertise of your topic or is known for having deep knowledge about the topic. The more popular the person you are citing is, the more efficient your introduction will be.
• Story-telling or reproducing a dialogue might also help, provided they are relevant and short.
• Starting with a question or with a situation regarding the topic you are about to talk about might also be a good introduction idea.

You might even want to combine some of these ideas and write your introduction based on an example and a statistic or any other possible combination. Whatever you choose, make sure it stays to the point and is catchy to the eye of the reader.

How You Can Connect Introduction to Conclusion

Another important aspect that you need to consider when writing your introduction to the response essay is that you need to somehow connect it to the conclusion. In order for you to achieve a perfectly cyclic response essay, you need to find a way to make the two feel correspondent. This will help your response essay have a “frame” and will help your writing style be more efficient.

It might be a bit difficult at first to start with an introduction and end with a conclusion that are connected, mostly if you want to write very long and thorough response essays. However, one important suggestion that might help is to always make sure that before starting off your response essay, you are clear about the ideas and position you want to present. This will help you avoid changing your position as you advance in writing your essay and make your introduction and conclusion connected, giving a sense of symmetry to your text.

Below you can find some examples of how you can connect your introduction with the conclusion:

• If you are writing about the usage of mobile devices in our everyday life, you could start your introduction by exposing a real-life experience, maybe someone who is driving to work on a normal day and is stuck in traffic. You could start by asking your readers what they would do on their phones as they wait in traffic and end with several possible outcomes of this scenario.
• If you are choosing to present an essay about a personal experience and you start with an introduction about how a certain day started in your life, you could end your essay with how that day ended. This way, you will make sure you keep your readers connected to the story and have their attention all throughout the essay.
• If you decide to write about any other topic, such as a topic of national importance or even an environmental topic, you could start by stating the facts to which you want to draw the attention and end with the facts about the current situation or how it can be improved.

How to Write a Strong Thesis

After making sure that you have caught your readers’ attention, it is all about making it clear to them what your position regarding the source article is. However, you should also provide a context to your response article by mentioning details about the author and the main ideas in the article that you have chosen to respond to. It can be that you are choosing to respond only partially, to a few of the ideas presented there, so this is the reason why it is important to clearly state the ideas of the article you want to respond to. Make sure to give an account of whatever it is debated in the article, by presenting the information in an objective way. At this point, it is more important for your readers to understand what you are trying to agree or disagree with than hear your personal opinion. Also, exposing the ideas of the source text in an objective, impersonal way will help your readers decide for themselves if the position you are taking is one that they would take or not.

Afterwards, it is vital that you expose what is known as “thesis statement” by allocating one paragraph in which you clearly state if you agree or disagree with the main topic presented in the source text. This should start with “I agree/I don’t agree with” and should be followed by a short and powerful message about the main reason why you are taking this position regarding that text.

The next step is to talk more about the reasons you are considering attacking or agreeing with the ideas presented in the original text. This can be done by either reviewing what the author is saying or just expanding on the main ideas. You can, for example, try to understand why the author has reached a certain conclusion that you are debating by trying to relate it to the author’s background or career. It can be that the author has chosen to promote oil drilling because they work in a factory that wants to make this process a sustainable one. It is important that you stay true to your debate and present the situation from both points of view: yours and the author’s.

How to Respond to Articles – Ideas

After tackling the introduction and the conclusion, the main body of your response essay is left to deal with. This is mainly the way in which you choose to present the source text and where you are standing regarding it. It is up to you if you choose to agree or disagree, however, what you have to keep in mind is that you need to be consistent and stay true to the topic you have chosen to debate.

One way to do that is to map the main three components of the response essay, namely, the introduction, body, and conclusion. Here are some helpful suggestions on how to structure your responding ideas:

• Whether you agree or disagree, you can state 3 or more reasons for which you are doing so. Make sure to start each new paragraph and allocate enough space for your ideas to be clearly distinguished and stated.
• If you are partially agreeing or disagreeing, make sure to always mention that so that your readers will clearly understand your position.
• It is always important to see how the author’s ideas managed to reach the audience and in which ways the ideas were brought forward.

How to Better Structure the Body of the Response Essay

Make sure to utilize evidence to back-up your thesis. In order to do this, you can use quotes, author tags or simply rely on other readings and give references.

Make sure that you achieve a personal voice throughout the text. This can be done by differentiating yourself from the author and using author tags.

By using author tags, you communicate to your readers the fact that it is the author you are responding to who has a certain idea or it is their article that makes this reference. You can use any of these suggestions when talking about someone’s article:

• The author mentions
• The author refers to
• The author is suggesting
• The author writes
• The author asks
• The author recommends
• The author is presenting
• The author points out
• The author relates
• The author pleads
• The author denies
• The author’s remarks point to
• The author explains

Write a Conclusion Your Readers Won’t Forget

One important thing to keep in mind when writing a conclusion to your response essay is that you shouldn’t repeat the arguments in the same form in which you have presented them in the body. Offering a conclusion to your response article is still needed, as this will help your readers make a clear decision whether they agree or disagree with the ideas presented in your response essay.

Besides making sure that your essay is built around a very powerful introduction and a conclusion that sums up the main ideas of your position regarding this essay, you can also:

• Present the topic that you have been debating throughout the essay in a broader perspective; for example, if the topic you are tackling is national, you can connect this topic to the situation in other countries worldwide
• Promote an organization or an event that has some influence on the topic you have been responding to
• Present the current situation of the topic you are talking about and ring the alarm if anything needs to be done about it
• Summarize how your arguments shed a new light on the topic

A Brief Summary of How a Response Essay Should Look Like

Keeping everything in mind, the essential parts of a response essay and the main suggestions that you have to keep in mind when starting to write are:

• Paragraph 1: The first part of the introduction which needs to be vivid, catchy and reflect the point you are about to make.
• Paragraph 2: Provide a context to your response essay: details about the source-text and the author and what the main points in the article are.
• State your position regarding the ideas presented in the introduction and if you agree with the author’s take on the matter or not.
• Clearly mention if you are going to question the author’s position or expand on the author’s account of the facts.
• Give clear arguments pro or against the matter and allocate one paragraph to each of these arguments.
• Use statistics, story-telling, research findings, scientific discoveries, and any other tools suggested in this article.
• Provide an insightful and catchy conclusion that correlates with the introduction you have chosen for your response essay.

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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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How to Write a Critical Response Essay With Examples and Tips

16 January 2024

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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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• How to Write a Response Essay
• How to Write a Response Essay: Things That Make It Work

What is a Response Essay?

Response paper purposes and objectives, how to write a response paper step-by-step, develop a strong response essay thesis, creating response essay outline, response essay structure, 1. response essay introduction, 2. main body, 3. response paper conclusion, response essay examples, what are important dos and don’ts, common response paper format mistakes, where to get expert assistance, 1. what is a reader response essay, 2. what is a short response essay, 3. what is the difference between summary and response essays.

Response essays are written to teach you to reflect on a specific written piece . Such essays are perfect for checking your ability to express your points coherently. How to write a response essay? Organize your workflow - define major points , provide logical reasoning to draw a reader in.  And, of course, close it with a strong summary . Your teacher may ask you to express your attitude to a text. You may be required to describe the writer's intention, topic or story. In any case, a good response paper requires quite an effort. So let’s start and find out where to start, how to focus on school work and what our final goal is.

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According to the response paper definition, this piece of writing has to trigger thought-provoking questions or issues . Feel free to include your personal perspective and give a deep analysis and overall meaning. All of your statements and arguments should be sound. Support them with enough evidence and examples.

A response or reaction essay is asked by professors so that you carefully study what you feel or think about a particular work. This type of writing takes a considerable amount of time for research. You need to interpret a text and review how it serves its unique purpose . What are the things to focus on? When reading your literary piece, answer the following questions:

• How you feel about it
• Whether you agree or disagree with the author
• The best way to value the entire story

Your major objective is to find your unique angle and to disclose it with references and critical commentary.

If you wonder how to write a good response essay , follow these simple steps :

• Understand your first impressions
• Define a subject and give reasoning
• Determine strong and weak points
• Make a summary outline

Focus on your personal impressions when reading a text. Firstly you should outline its title, style and specify the major idea. Pay attention to the key questions or issues you deal with. Also, define the subtext, provide an explanation for specific details. Point out their meaning or importance on global and personal levels. Reflect on your life experiences. Determine weak and strong points of the entire content in body paragraphs. Tell readers your attitude towards those ideas. Let them know if you disagree or agree with the writer’s point. To sound legit, you need to present good counter arguments that you can bring up. Finally, summarize all thoughts and restate your thesis in a conclusion.

Response essay thesis is a major idea that you stand for in your paper. In most cases, the thesis is reflected in just 1-2 sentences. But completing this task can be pretty challenging. You need to interpret and understand a text and express your opinion. State your major idea in a brief sentence in an opening paragraph. A good thesis statement is a cornerstone of a successful paper. Do not haste with it and spend some extra time composing the best one.

Response paper outline is a planned structure of the text, key ideas, and points. Write an outline before starting a paper to get the major idea of your structure. But what to include in its outline? There are certain components that should be present in your plan. For instance, the chosen point of view, major argument, and so on. Your opinion can take the following forms:

• Disagreement or agreement with ideas
• Examination of authors and their audience
• Reflection on how concepts describe other ideas
• Feedback to how major arguments relate to your own experiences
• Assessment of how a text influences readers

A good essay outline may facilitate your writing process. So it’s always better to start with one when you have already defined the topic. Still have some questions? Read one more blog - it is about an argumentative essay outline . This essay type has the same structure and you can get more useful tips.

Response essays have a regular 3-part essay structure. It includes an introduction, body, and conclusion. However, the actual content and intent of this essay are different. Learn its specifics and check the easy steps to writing its structure.

Response paper introduction starts with a few sentences to summarize the work you have read. You may also make notes while researching the topic to use in your intro. It should be brief and precise. An introduction should be closed and summed up with a strong, debatable thesis statement.

In the main body of the response paper, express your main ideas and reactions. It should consist of at least three paragraphs. Make sure to explain one reaction per paragraph. Otherwise, you risk making your paper messy.

The response essay conclusion should summarize the main ideas mentioned in the paper. Restate the writer’s thesis statement in the introductory paragraph. Avoid repeating the same ideas, preferably synthesize new ones. Also, do not introduce any new ideas in conclusion. And don’t use ideas that contradict the arguments given in the paper.

And now, it will be good for you to check out response essay examples. We offer several professional essay samples. Examine the structure, the style, and the narration. Pay attention to important elements as the thesis statement and conclusion. Check out the paper attached below.

A good response paper should include a review of the author’s work based on your critical judgments about its concept. Make sure that your writing reflects the ideas that you disagree or agree with.  Make sure that it classifies weak and strong points logically. A good response essay has to be convincing. It must be based on relevant examples and strong evidence. And, of course, to reflect your attitude. Dos:

• Analyze a figurative and thematic meaning of your story
• Describe your emotional attitude towards characters
• Use interesting examples or quotes
• Review text several times to make sure you noticed everything
• Add your unique perspective and vision
• Avoid simply reviewing and summarizing the plot
• Never say that you don’t like major or minor characters for no reason
• Don’t simplify, don’t give vague reasons behind your analysis and reflection
• Avoid making obvious or superficial insights
• Don’t repeat the ideas of other students

Also, keep in mind such basic things as grammar and punctuation. If you want your response paper to look great, spend some effort on proofreading.

Response essay format requires a writer to follow certain stylistic rules. To submit a perfect draft, make sure that you avoid all common mistakes. For instance, including your personal story in a response essay can be inappropriate. It is not an essay about yourself to feature your life experiences. Don’t reiterate the same thoughts again. Never retell readers the whole text because teachers expect you to analyze the information. The other typical mistake is procrastination. Many students tend to procrastinate because of the task’s difficulty. This academic assignment is time-consuming, and it requires in-depth analysis and reading. Set aside enough time to complete it successfully. Look for useful samples or templates to avoid making common mistakes. It's a winning strategy to end up with top-quality content.

After reading this helpful guide , you’ll get a clear idea of how to write the best response essay with ease. What if it’s not enough? If you feel that you need extra help , turn to online professionals! Reach your academic goals with effective custom writing solutions.

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A reader response essay is a form of reflection on a book, essay, or another historical source. This essay requires good knowledge of the text and may involve direct quotations. The author needs to express the attitude to the text, not to retell the plot.

A short response essay is normally between 300 and 500 words. This variation usually serves as classwork for 25-30 minutes.

The difference between summary and response lies in the writer’s intent. In the summary essay, you need to analyze and interpret the information. When in a responsive essay, you need to express your opinion on some point. In most cases - opinion on a book, essay, or text.  

When your rhetorical analysis essay is due next week, you cannot escape this problem anymore. Further procrastination will lead to the failing grade. As far as each paper matters for your final score per course, it is important to catch up with all deadlines.You may face this kind of assignment for ...

What is a classification essay? Students often write this paper in social and science studies. If you need to complete this assignment, but you don’t know how to write a classification essay, there’s no need to panic. To answer the question what is a classification essay, the first thing that you sh...

You have definitely learned some definitions at school and college or even had to give your own definition of some terms or things. You know that definitions are usually short and consist of one to three sentences. But now you’ve got a task to write the whole definition essay. Have no idea how to wr...

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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 439,461 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

Community Q&A

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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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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 an argumentative essay | Examples & tips

How to Write an Argumentative Essay | Examples & Tips

Published on July 24, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on July 23, 2023.

An argumentative essay expresses an extended argument for a particular thesis statement . The author takes a clearly defined stance on their subject and builds up an evidence-based case for it.

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When do you write an argumentative essay, approaches to argumentative essays, introducing your argument, the body: developing your argument, concluding your argument, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about argumentative essays.

You might be assigned an argumentative essay as a writing exercise in high school or in a composition class. The prompt will often ask you to argue for one of two positions, and may include terms like “argue” or “argument.” It will frequently take the form of a question.

The prompt may also be more open-ended in terms of the possible arguments you could make.

Argumentative writing at college level

At university, the vast majority of essays or papers you write will involve some form of argumentation. For example, both rhetorical analysis and literary analysis essays involve making arguments about texts.

In this context, you won’t necessarily be told to write an argumentative essay—but making an evidence-based argument is an essential goal of most academic writing, and this should be your default approach unless you’re told otherwise.

Examples of argumentative essay prompts

At a university level, all the prompts below imply an argumentative essay as the appropriate response.

Your research should lead you to develop a specific position on the topic. The essay then argues for that position and aims to convince the reader by presenting your evidence, evaluation and analysis.

• Don’t just list all the effects you can think of.
• Do develop a focused argument about the overall effect and why it matters, backed up by evidence from sources.
• Don’t just provide a selection of data on the measures’ effectiveness.
• Do build up your own argument about which kinds of measures have been most or least effective, and why.
• Don’t just analyze a random selection of doppelgänger characters.
• Do form an argument about specific texts, comparing and contrasting how they express their thematic concerns through doppelgänger characters.

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An argumentative essay should be objective in its approach; your arguments should rely on logic and evidence, not on exaggeration or appeals to emotion.

There are many possible approaches to argumentative essays, but there are two common models that can help you start outlining your arguments: The Toulmin model and the Rogerian model.

Toulmin arguments

The Toulmin model consists of four steps, which may be repeated as many times as necessary for the argument:

• Make a claim
• Provide the grounds (evidence) for the claim
• Explain the warrant (how the grounds support the claim)
• Discuss possible rebuttals to the claim, identifying the limits of the argument and showing that you have considered alternative perspectives

The Toulmin model is a common approach in academic essays. You don’t have to use these specific terms (grounds, warrants, rebuttals), but establishing a clear connection between your claims and the evidence supporting them is crucial in an argumentative essay.

Say you’re making an argument about the effectiveness of workplace anti-discrimination measures. You might:

• Claim that unconscious bias training does not have the desired results, and resources would be better spent on other approaches
• Cite data to support your claim
• Explain how the data indicates that the method is ineffective
• Anticipate objections to your claim based on other data, indicating whether these objections are valid, and if not, why not.

Rogerian arguments

The Rogerian model also consists of four steps you might repeat throughout your essay:

• Discuss what the opposing position gets right and why people might hold this position
• Highlight the problems with this position
• Present your own position , showing how it addresses these problems
• Suggest a possible compromise —what elements of your position would proponents of the opposing position benefit from adopting?

This model builds up a clear picture of both sides of an argument and seeks a compromise. It is particularly useful when people tend to disagree strongly on the issue discussed, allowing you to approach opposing arguments in good faith.

Say you want to argue that the internet has had a positive impact on education. You might:

• Acknowledge that students rely too much on websites like Wikipedia
• Argue that teachers view Wikipedia as more unreliable than it really is
• Suggest that Wikipedia’s system of citations can actually teach students about referencing
• Suggest critical engagement with Wikipedia as a possible assignment for teachers who are skeptical of its usefulness.

You don’t necessarily have to pick one of these models—you may even use elements of both in different parts of your essay—but it’s worth considering them if you struggle to structure your arguments.

Regardless of which approach you take, your essay should always be structured using an introduction , a body , and a conclusion .

Like other academic essays, an argumentative essay begins with an introduction . The introduction serves to capture the reader’s interest, provide background information, present your thesis statement , and (in longer essays) to summarize the structure of the body.

Hover over different parts of the example below to see how a typical introduction works.

The spread of the internet has had a world-changing effect, not least on the world of education. The use of the internet in academic contexts is on the rise, and its role in learning is hotly debated. For many teachers who did not grow up with this technology, its effects seem alarming and potentially harmful. This concern, while understandable, is misguided. The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its critical benefits for students and educators—as a uniquely comprehensive and accessible information source; a means of exposure to and engagement with different perspectives; and a highly flexible learning environment.

The body of an argumentative essay is where you develop your arguments in detail. Here you’ll present evidence, analysis, and reasoning to convince the reader that your thesis statement is true.

In the standard five-paragraph format for short essays, the body takes up three of your five paragraphs. In longer essays, it will be more paragraphs, and might be divided into sections with headings.

Each paragraph covers its own topic, introduced with a topic sentence . Each of these topics must contribute to your overall argument; don’t include irrelevant information.

This example paragraph takes a Rogerian approach: It first acknowledges the merits of the opposing position and then highlights problems with that position.

Hover over different parts of the example to see how a body paragraph is constructed.

A common frustration for teachers is students’ use of Wikipedia as a source in their writing. Its prevalence among students is not exaggerated; a survey found that the vast majority of the students surveyed used Wikipedia (Head & Eisenberg, 2010). An article in The Guardian stresses a common objection to its use: “a reliance on Wikipedia can discourage students from engaging with genuine academic writing” (Coomer, 2013). Teachers are clearly not mistaken in viewing Wikipedia usage as ubiquitous among their students; but the claim that it discourages engagement with academic sources requires further investigation. This point is treated as self-evident by many teachers, but Wikipedia itself explicitly encourages students to look into other sources. Its articles often provide references to academic publications and include warning notes where citations are missing; the site’s own guidelines for research make clear that it should be used as a starting point, emphasizing that users should always “read the references and check whether they really do support what the article says” (“Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia,” 2020). Indeed, for many students, Wikipedia is their first encounter with the concepts of citation and referencing. The use of Wikipedia therefore has a positive side that merits deeper consideration than it often receives.

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An argumentative essay ends with a conclusion that summarizes and reflects on the arguments made in the body.

No new arguments or evidence appear here, but in longer essays you may discuss the strengths and weaknesses of your argument and suggest topics for future research. In all conclusions, you should stress the relevance and importance of your argument.

Hover over the following example to see the typical elements of a conclusion.

The internet has had a major positive impact on the world of education; occasional pitfalls aside, its value is evident in numerous applications. The future of teaching lies in the possibilities the internet opens up for communication, research, and interactivity. As the popularity of distance learning shows, students value the flexibility and accessibility offered by digital education, and educators should fully embrace these advantages. The internet’s dangers, real and imaginary, have been documented exhaustively by skeptics, but the internet is here to stay; it is time to focus seriously on its potential for good.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy

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An argumentative essay tends to be a longer essay involving independent research, and aims to make an original argument about a topic. Its thesis statement makes a contentious claim that must be supported in an objective, evidence-based way.

An expository essay also aims to be objective, but it doesn’t have to make an original argument. Rather, it aims to explain something (e.g., a process or idea) in a clear, concise way. Expository essays are often shorter assignments and rely less on research.

At college level, you must properly cite your sources in all essays , research papers , and other academic texts (except exams and in-class exercises).

Add a citation whenever you quote , paraphrase , or summarize information or ideas from a source. You should also give full source details in a bibliography or reference list at the end of your text.

The exact format of your citations depends on which citation style you are instructed to use. The most common styles are APA , MLA , and Chicago .

The majority of the essays written at university are some sort of argumentative essay . Unless otherwise specified, you can assume that the goal of any essay you’re asked to write is argumentative: To convince the reader of your position using evidence and reasoning.

In composition classes you might be given assignments that specifically test your ability to write an argumentative essay. Look out for prompts including instructions like “argue,” “assess,” or “discuss” to see if this is the goal.

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Talking (or Not) About Your Cancer

More from our inbox:, ‘political anxieties’, a mystery from england’s bronze age.

To the Editor:

Re “ It’s Not Easy to Tell People You Have Cancer ,” by Daniela J. Lamas (Opinion guest essay, March 27):

As a cancer survivor myself, I understand the reluctance of Catherine, Princess of Wales, to speak out about her own diagnosis. However, she has the unique opportunity to alert and educate many people regarding symptoms and treatments. And by speaking calmly and frankly, she has the additional opportunity to help remove the fear and stigma of a cancer diagnosis.

Of course, she has no obligation to do this, but perhaps as time passes and she is no longer in the first stages of shock, she will be able to do a truly selfless thing and help educate people about cancer.

Barbara Mutterperl New York

My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was 12 years old and she was 33. In the 1960s breast cancer was often fatal, and cancer was not discussed publicly. As the oldest child, I think I was told too much, not too little. Counseling would have been very helpful.

I am 75 and had early stage breast cancer four years ago. I was told my treatment would be over 90 percent successful; sharing that information normalized the situation and helped me get through the treatment. I am cancer free.

Some types of cancer have fairly good outcomes, while other types are almost always fatal. The more treatable a cancer is, the more comfortable a patient feels about telling friends about their diagnosis. And sharing information with children under 18 has to be done very carefully.

Catherine, Princess of Wales, has very young children. She and her husband will be careful about how much information to give them, hoping to be honest but not scare them unnecessarily. Expecting her to reveal her diagnosis in more detail would be inappropriate at this point.

Maureen Schild New York

The members of the royal family are funded by the people of Britain. If they do not abdicate their official roles, it is their duty to do good in this world for the people who afford them their sumptuous lifestyle (be it under press coverage under a microscope or not).

So if they are secretive about their cancer diagnosis, it sends a clear message — cancer is a secret, something to hide, to cover up, to be ashamed of — and that is simply awful for the millions of people who are diagnosed with cancer or who have some mysterious health condition that with proper attention is diagnosed, hopefully early, as cancer!

Catherine, Princess of Wales, is not an ordinary person. It is her duty in her role as a country’s figurehead to speak the truth and not cover up.

She and the crown mislead the public in calling her chemotherapy preventative. She is not taking chemo like a flu shot; you can’t go to your doctor and ask for some chemo to prevent you from getting cancer. Chemo kills cancer cells, plain and simple. It is a drug in the anticancer tool kit.

As a survivor of Stage 4 testicular cancer diagnosed 15 years ago, I know how such a diagnosis turns your world and that of those close to you upside down.

Catherine and the crown have the power, the responsibility and the duty to her employers — the people of Britain — and really to the world to speak the truth about her condition, to help them understand about cancer screening, about not shirking from the disease, about living with cancer and getting treatment for it, and about the many cases like mine that can be cured.

Roger S. Merians Simi Valley, Calif.

When I was growing up in the 1950s, people only whispered the letter C for cancer. And no one ever said out loud the possibility of someone being a homosexual. The word gay was never used.

Why do people keep secrets? Sometimes it’s shame; other times we don’t want to experience other people’s reaction to the news, or to worry our family or friends.

I have no trouble telling people about my 2019 cancer diagnosis. When I came out as a lesbian 46 years ago, I was thrilled to finally be out of the closet, but I told less than a handful of people. It took a while to be open about my sexuality.

Every person, famous or not, gets to decide what to reveal and when. But keeping a secret because of shame or embarrassment is very toxic.

Beth Rosen Bronx The writer is a psychotherapist.

Dr. Daniela J. Lamas’s article brought back memories from my diagnosis with spleen cancer in 2005.

I told adult family members and neighbors, but decided not to tell my daughters (then 14 and 9) any specifics, referring vaguely to an abdominal condition that required surgery.

I did not want to derail the ability of the 14-year-old to rebel and act like a normal teen, and I wanted to spare the 9-year-old, who was already a worrier who thought of me as vulnerable. I told myself that if I needed chemotherapy, I would tell my children at that point. Fortunately, I ended up not needing chemo.

What we did not count on was that the children of those adults we had told would see their parents’ emails or texts and inform our children that I had cancer.

It took years for me to regain my children’s trust that I would be truthful and not hide important information from them. So be mindful that your kids have a lot more access to information than we had at their age.

Barbara Quackenbos West Orange, N.J.

Re “ America’s Most Overlooked Political Divide ,” by David French (column, March 25):

I found Mr. French’s description of people on both sides of today’s political divide deciding to “unplug from the news” unsurprising.

Since 2016, patients in my practice, on both the left and the right of the political divide, have reported being distraught by a daily onslaught of political news. Consequently, I began including “political anxieties” as one problem distressing patients who could not tear themselves away from a favorite cable news network’s unending servings of doom and gloom punditry.

My response, and practical advice I follow myself, is suggesting to patients that rather than immersion in distressing cable news, just scan online headlines. Doing so provides a sense of what is going on in the world. However, I also advise not going into the weeds, as doing so only heightens political anxieties.

Some find this to be a reasonable balance between being an anxiously overstimulated citizen and a disengaged one.

Jack Drescher New York The writer, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is past president of the Group for Advancement of Psychiatry.

Re “ Under Centuries of Silt, a Vivid View of Bronze Age Life ” (news article, March 21):

I have not been able to stop thinking about this extremely moving article about the surprisingly rich lives lived by the inhabitants of a Bronze Age village in England nearly 3,000 years ago. It makes one think that the high point of human existence may have actually occurred thousands of years ago.

These people were steeped in beauty, the bounties of nature, the satisfaction of craftsmanship and the joy of one another’s company. In stark contrast to humans today, they lived in quiet harmony with the earth.

The most fascinating mystery to me is why they never returned to salvage their things after, as you report, “a catastrophic fire tore through the compound.” Could it be that they felt no special attachment to their belongings?

As the article stated, these people had the skills to easily move and rebuild their compound. Perhaps they felt that their greatest possession was the earth itself.

Philip Dolin New York

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Oppenheimer and the Nuclear Question History Impossible

Hey all, I hope you’re doing well. I have for all of you the audio adaptation of the essay I wrote last year in response to my seeing the magisterial Oppenheimer, and given its newly Oscar-anointed status, I figured now would be the best time to get this out as a bonus as you all patiently await the return of the Muslim Nazis series (it’s still coming, worry not!). In this, we cover, mostly from my own memory (but supported by sources), the various reasons the United States might have dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To say this is a complicated question is an understatement. To say there is a consensus, even almost 80 years later, is impossible. So we’re going to get into the weeds with this question while also showing the love Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus deserves. And as always, History Impossible has been made possible by the following generous supporters on Patreon, Substack, and PayPal. Please consider donating today to help keep me free and this show alive: David Adamcik Rajan Athul Babeonbobby Dave Baxter Michael Beach Benjamin Elias Borota Johannes Breitsameter Charles C Cliffydeuce CR daddygorgon Paul DeCoster Neil Dickens Nathan Diehl Bob Downing Dramicas Rob Duval Gavin Edwards Pierre Ghazarian Jayson Griesmeyer Nathan Grote Benjamin Hamilton Peter Hauck Carey Hurst Joe6245 Thomas Justesen Mike Kalnins Bryn Kaufman Leah Kodner Benjamin Lee Constance Loucks Maddy Mounty of Madness Jose Martinez Mike Mayleben Judy McCoid Jim Miller Kyle Mohney Kostas Moros Ryan Mortenson Cameron Needham Skip Pacheco David Page Molly Pan Jeff Parrent Jean Peters John Pisano Sr. Powell Brian Pritzl AnaR737 PJ Rader Gleb Radutsky Aleksandr Rakitin Reptilycus Phillip Rice Chris Rowe Jon Andre Saether Alison Salo Jake Scalia Emily Schmidt Julian Schmidt Andrew Seeber Joshua Simpson Cameron Smith Thomas Squeo Brian Steggeman Pier-Luc St-Pierre Athal Krishna Sundarrajan Jared Cole Temple ChrisTX Robert VS Jonny Wilkie Ricky Worthey Michael Wroblewski F. You

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• Copyright Alexander von Sternberg

Top Podcasts In History

Gem AI: Ask & Chat with AI 4 4+

Powered by ai gpt essay writer, mobile ocean, designed for ipad.

• 4.6 • 2.2K Ratings
• Offers In-App Purchases

Screenshots

Description.

Ask AI – Chat Smart Assistant is a powerful chatbot app that uses the latest artificial intelligence technology ChatGPT-4 to provide you with a unique conversation experience. Whether you're looking for an assistant to help you with your daily work, creating content for all platforms or looking for an answer to a problem, Ask AI-Chat Smart Assistant helps you. With our Ask AI app, you can use all aspects of artificial intelligence such as post ideas for Instagram, Twitter threads, video ideas and getting an answer to every question you ask for your assignments. With Ask AI, you can have natural conversations and perform essential tasks such as work and school. Whether you want to get advice, find new connections, chat about the news or plan for the future, you can find answers to all your life questions on Ask AI. -> What can you do with the Ask AI – Chat Smart Assistant app?: - Get correct answers to all your questions with AI algorithm, - Get summaries of the essays you have trouble reading in seconds, - Create your social media or academic texts with Ask AI, - Perform your intertextual translations, - Code on the subjects you need, - Get advice on the subjects you need information, - Debug and fix the code, - Solve mathematical equations, - Correct grammatical errors in any language, - Write stories and compose poems, - Write professional E-mail texts, Please don't hesitate to contact us at [email protected] About Subscriptions and Terms of Use: - For some features of Ask AI, a Premium subscription is needed. - Payment will be made from your iTunes account after you confirm the purchase. - Subscriptions will auto-renew at the end of each term if it is not canceled 24 hours before the end of the purchasing term. - The user can manage subscriptions. Auto-renew can be turned off from iTunes account settings. - You can cancel your subscriptions by entering: http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202039 Privacy Policy: - https://sites.google.com/view/askaiapp/home Terms of Use: - https://sites.google.com/view/askaiapp/termsofuse

Version 1.4.1

-> App name changed.

Ratings and Reviews

2.2K Ratings

Follow-up questions malfunction

The app is great. It answers questions with 99% accuracy. But the one thing that annoys me are “follow-up questions”. Whenever I want to ask a follow up question of a previous I asked first, it tends to not write anything. Rather it just gives me this “<“ symbol. I don’t know if it’s trying to buffer an answer or what. When I closed the app and reopened it, it still doesn’t give me a follow up answer. Is there a way to fix this? This AI app has so much potential that I don’t wanna think that this was a waste of money.

Developer Response ,

We're so glad to hear that you're loving Ask AI: Chat Genius AI Chatbot!:) Our team worked for this issue and we have fixed it. Please update the app to the latest version! If you need any further assistance, please reach our support team via email. Best! Support Team

Ask AI is Just the Beginning

What was once the domain of advanced computer labs, think tanks and the military is now available to the average person thanks to apps like Ask AI. Although still in its infancy, the future of what AI is capable of is staggering. Just as PhotoShop has made the average person a better photographer, Ask AI will allow anyone to become more knowledgeable, a better writer and, hopefully future visionaries who will mold AI into a positive tool to aid mankind. (This review was NOT written with Ask AI.)

This game helps me a lot it’s literally the best ai i have seen for now, This game even tells me some stuff they I been wanting to know like it’s like a real ai i would say it’s better than Siri my opinion just bc Siri sometimes doesn’t get what I’m saying right and then she just makes says something that i didn’t tell her rlly i wouldn’t say its bad I just don’t like the part when it says no internet connection even tho i got internet, but that’s all I rlly wanna say abt this

Dear User, We're so glad to hear that you're loving Ask AI: Chat Genius AI Chatbot! Your support means a lot to us, and we're committed to maintaining the high quality you've come to expect. If you ever have questions or need assistance within Ask AI, don't hesitate to reach out. We appreciate your trust in Ask AI! Regards, ASK AI Support Team

NOW AVAILABLE

App privacy.

The developer, Mobile Ocean , indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .

Data Used to Track You

The following data may be used to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies:

• Identifiers

Data Not Linked to You

The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:

• Diagnostics

Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More

Information

English, Arabic, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish

• Ask ai Smart Chat Weekly Pro $6.99
• Ask AI Smart Chat Yearly Pro $39.99
• Premium Yearly Chatbot AskAI $29.99
• Ask AI - Chatbot Lifetime Pro $79.99
• App Support
• Privacy Policy

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