For your first major writing assignment, you will write a reading response essay. Reading response essays focus on the reading experience that an individual reader has when they read and carefully consider the ways in which a text creates meaning for them.
A strong reading response will consider the emotional reading experience, intellectual reading experience, cultural reading experience, and perhaps even metaphysical reading experience.
However, reading response essays should be organized around a coherent analysis and explanation of the reading experience, perhaps by focusing on unifying themes or elements experienced throughout the process of reading and re-reading a particular text.
Here is a list of possible ways to focus your reading response analysis. You could
explain how reading the text changed your understanding of your own culture or society,
explain how reading the text changed your understanding of another culture or society,
explain how reading the text changed your understanding of history or the past,
explain how reading the text changed your understanding of yourself,
explain how reading the text changed your understanding of the experience of others,
explain how reading the text changed your understanding of the power of words and language to impact people, or
explain how reading the text changed your understanding of intellectual, philosophical, political, or metaphysical ideas or notions.
Requirements and Expectations:
This reading response essay should be about your experience reading one of the prose texts that we have all ready read this semester. You may choose any prose text from our Course Schedule as long as it was assigned on or before Week 7.
Each section of the essay should discuss particular literary elements (narrative voice, diction, conflict, plot, mood, setting, etc.) and use specific literary terms in order to develop your explanation of your reading experience
Your essay should have a clear thesis which unifies the observations of the essay around a clear and dominate position. All sections of the essay should work to further develop and explain the thesis in greater detail.
Each section of the essay should reference and quote specific passages from the text in order to illustrate, support, and explain your assertions.
Your essay should use in-text citations and a Works Cited page (using MLA formatting) for all quotations and specific references to the literary text.
Purpose:
to become more aware of the impact of reading;
to practice critical reading skills;
to think critically about genre, style, language, audience, and purpose;
to practice developing and supporting argumentative assertions with clear logic, evidence, and discussion; and
to develop a deeper understanding of the experiences, ideas, and values of other people, societies, and cultures
Audience:
