15.3 Approaches to Response

There may be times in your academic career when you are asked to form a response to a source without including any of your personal experience. In these cases, it can help to establish a set of parameters to focus and structure your response. You might ask yourself any of the following questions:

• What is the author’s strongest point? What is the weakest?
• What aspects of the author’s argument are the most controversial?
• What three pieces of information in this essay are the most useful?
• What is the author’s the most effective use of logos? of pathos?
• Which sections of the essay are the most relevant and current?

Another strategy for framing your response is to focus in on the author’s argument as though you were preparing for debate class—by identifying and summarizing their main points and then responding to the assumptions underlying the premise of their argument. This technique for forming your response to the author can work well as a brainstorming activity, whether working in a group or working on your own.

For instance, one English 162 class I observed was given the in-class activity of brainstorming three counterpoints to the following action-oriented arguments:

1.) College student loan debt should be forgiven.

2.) Government funds should be used to resolve poverty.

3.) Students should not have their cell phones out during class.

The students questioned each proposed solution: Does the author provide a viable procedure for how to implement the proposed solution? Is the solution feasible? Is it cost-effective? Is it practical in terms of time to implement? How long would this take? What level of impact would this solution have? What problems might result from this proposed solution? Is the solution fair and equitable?

The students’ formal responses were written in response to their answers to those questions.

First-year writing courses are designed to teach a range of writing—from the personal to the academic—so that you can learn to express advanced ideas, arguments, concepts, or theories in any discipline. Since critical thinking and analysis are key elements of the reading and writing you will do in college, it is important to understand how they form a part of academic writing. No matter how intimidating the term “academic writing” may seem, embrace it not as a temporary college requirement but as a habit of mind.

To some, academic writing often implies impersonal writing, writing that is detached, distant, and lacking in personal meaning or relevance. However, this is often not true of the academic writing you will do in a composition class. Here your presence as a writer—your thoughts, experiences, ideas, and therefore who you are—is of much significance to the writing you produce. In fact, it would not be farfetched to say that in a writing class academic writing often begins with personal writing.

Let me explain. If critical thinking begins with a personal view of the text, academic writing helps you broaden that view by going beyond the personal to a more universal point of view. In other words, academic writing often has its roots in one’s private opinion or perspective about another writer’s ideas but ultimately goes beyond this opinion to the expression of larger, more abstract ideas. Your personal vision—your core beliefs and general approach to life—will help you arrive at these “larger ideas” or universal propositions that any reader can understand and be enlightened by, if not agree with. In short, academic writing is largely about taking a critical, analytical stance toward a subject in order to arrive at some compelling conclusions.

Let us now think about how you might apply your critical thinking skills to move from a personal reaction to a more formal academic response to an essay. This involves textual analysis and requires you to do the following:

• Summarize the writer’s ideas the best you can in a brief paragraph. This provides the basis for extended analysis since it contains the central ideas of the piece, the building blocks, so to speak.
• Evaluate the most important ideas of the essay by considering their merits or flaws, their worthiness or lack of worthiness. Do not merely agree or disagree with the ideas but explore and explain why you believe they are socially, politically, philosophically, or historically important and relevant, or why you need to question, challenge, or reject them.
• Identify gaps or discrepancies in the writer’s argument. Does she contradict herself? If so, explain how this contradiction forces you to think more deeply about her ideas. Or if you are confused, explain what is confusing and why.
• Examine the strategies the writer uses to express her ideas. Look particularly at her style, voice, use of figurative language, and the way she structures her essay and organizes her ideas. Do these strategies strengthen or weaken her argument? How?
• Optionally, include a second text—an essay, a poem, lyrics of a song—whose ideas enhance your reading and analysis of the primary text. This text may help provide evidence by supporting a point you’re making and furthering your argument.
• Extend the writer’s ideas, develop your own perspective, and propose new ways of thinking about the subject at hand.

One way that you may be asked to respond to the text you’ve summarized is to draw connections back to your own life. Because the ideas we encounter in academic writing try to explain something about how the world works, it can be clarifying to reflect on how they relate to your lived experience. For example, review the sample summary/response assignment included below. That assignment asks you to summarize Sherry’s Turkle essay, “Growing Up Tethered,” and then to write about whether Turkle’s observations about cell phones and social media tell you something about your own use of those technologies.

This assignment doesn’t ask you to simply “react” to Turkle’s essay (It’s good/bad, interesting/not interesting . . .) but rather to engage deeply with its ideas. By writing this response, you have a chance to learn something about yourself–to use someone else’s ideas to examine a part of your life that you may not have thought too much about before. At the same time, the assignment gives you the opportunity to test or add to Turkle’s research. Turkle bases her observations on interviews with students like you. The stories and observations that you share in your response may further confirm her observations, or they may reveal something new. Either way, you’re collaborating with Turkle to better understand the current role of technology in our lives.

Keep in mind, if your instructor has asked you to write about personal experience in your response, that doesn’t mean that your response should be informal, unorganized, or uncritical in some way. “Personal” doesn’t necessarily mean “non-academic.” Rather, when you respond from personal experience, you should treat your own life as evidence or data that you need to think critically about. If you were responding to the Sherry Turkle assignment, you would want to share detailed stories or examples from your own life, analyze them carefully, and connect them clearly back to the ideas Turkle shares.