The basic format for a response paper is somewhat like a traditional “five paragraph essay,” where you have a well-developed introduction, three substantial body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Your introduction should clearly establish your focus and argument, but you want also to strive to engage your reader with lively prose.
The basic format for a response paper is somewhat like a traditional “five paragraph essay,” where you have a well-developed introduction, three substantial body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Your introduction should clearly establish your focus and argument, but you want also to strive to engage your reader with lively prose.
Often it is wise to provide some guideposts within the introduction as to what the central subtopics of the paper will be. Subsequent body paragraphs then take up those subtopics in an organized manner; key points should be illustrated with direct reference to the text under consideration. This is where you cultivate your close reading skills: analyze the language carefully; attend to punctuation when relevant; consider the author’s tone, the imagery invoked, and anything else that you think contributes to the meaning of the text and/or to the effect that it has on the reader. Direct quotes from the text under consideration can often help not only to illustrate your points, but to provide some variation to the prose. Your conclusion should avoid simply restating what has already been said. Instead, strive to synthesize your insights and to suggest their significance. While this “five paragraph” format is easy to follow, certain topics, ideas, and arguments do not necessarily lend themselves to the format and it is best to let your ideas and argument determine the structure of your response paper—not to follow preordained guidelines if they don’t work well!
The length of the response paper will probably be in the 2- to 3-page ballpark. As you choose topics, try to aim for specificity and focus, as opposed to breadth. Often students worry unnecessarily that they won’t be able to “get enough out of” a particular topic to generate a required number of pages. Gelman Library’s Writing Resources site provides useful commentary on “finding a topic” – please consult this site for guidance:
Remember that you want your paper to demonstrate your interpretive and analytical skills and so you are seeking to establish depth of analysis, rather than breadth of coverage. Do not feel compelled to re-tell the story (plot summary) or to explain “what happens” in a poem. Instead, try to focus on particular issues that emerge—the poet’s use of a specific image at various points in the poem, for example, or the development of a character in a particular episode of a novel. Keep in mind that this response paper is designed to enable you to begin to work out ideas and an argument. Should you find yourself excited about the topic’s potential, you might develop it further in the final paper for the course.
Finally, please remember to include your name, a title for the paper, and a source at the end (i.e., a bibliographic or “Works Cited” entry for the primary source—whether that be a single poem or an entire novel). Quotations from the work should be set off with quotation marks, followed at the end by the page number in parentheses. MLA or Chicago Style guides provide additional specific information for handling quotations. Better yet, consult Gelman Library’s Writing Resources site for guidance about matters of citation and plagiarism:
On this site, you’ll find very helpful information about and examples of proper ways to incorporate quotes from sources and to document your use of sources. I ask that quotations be introduced in some manner. In other words, rather than simply put a quotation into the middle of a paragraph of your prose when you want to illustrate a point, introduce and provide some contextual information that helps the reader (me, your peer-review partner) understand the context of the quote. An example would be as follows:
The pace of Wilfred Owens’ poem quickens substantially in the second stanza when he writes, “Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling” (p.1974).
Note that here I have incorporated the language of the poem I am writing about into my own poem; I provide some context for the reader by indicating that the passage is from the second stanza of the poem. The quotation marks enclose only the actual language of the poem, in this case as reprinted in the Norton Anthology. The page number is included in parentheses and the period comes after the parentheses.