One of the most sought after academic assignments, response paper writing involves a great deal of skills that are highly valuable for any college or university student. The skills include:

-          critical reading – identification of ideas, writing organization and textual purpose

-          critical thinking – story, context and concepts analysis and evaluation

-          reaction in writing – central ideas summarizing, stating personal opinion and supporting opinion by appropriate explanation, details, facts and quotes

When college students are required to write custom Response/Reaction Paper assignment, we suggest to follow our academic tips and advice from our Ph.D. level experts.

Definition of Response Essay

Response or reaction paper, writers answer to one or more texts they have read. College instructors highly evaluate this type of essay for the social sciences and humanities classes. Aside from developing an ability to understand each text individually, students are required to evaluate how well text accomplishes its objective. The response for multiple texts requires the discovery of the fact how these texts are related to one another.

Note: if there is a single text, the response should include a larger context with class discussions. The discussion of engaging question can be included in the paper if it raised interesting topic for the student. Otherwise, the discussion is worthless.

While some students may mistake a response paper assignment as an easy one, it can be pretty demanding than it initially appeared. Students should allow themselves enough time to read first an d then digest Start with getting clear definition of the topics of each text and find a strong connection between them. It is worth mentioning that the response paper requires students to synthesize the intellectual work of others and be presented in a form of finished writing as an integrated whole piece.

Answer the Following Questions

When readying the texts, refer to these easy-to-comprehend question that will help you to clear out your vision.

·         What is main issue of that the author addresses in the story?

·         What is the central argument, main concept or point of view?

·         What evidence the author presents to support his claim?

·         Are there any assumptions that the author makes?

·         Are there any possible counterarguments in the story?

·         Do you find any strengths or weaknesses?

·         Do you find the issue raised and supportive argument interesting or important?

When writing a response paper on several texts, please, consider the following questions.

·         How do the texts relate to one another?

·         Do the authors share common opinion?

·         Do the authors agree or disagree with each other?

·         Do these texts formulate or state the problem from a different point of view or in different ways?

·         In what way does the information (argument) of one text strengthens or weakens the information (argument) of other texts?

Actions To Take

1.       Start with thorough instructions reading to gain better insight of what you are expected to do.

2.       The instructor has specific expectations of students that must be taken into account if higher academic grades are wanted.

3.       The instructor does prompt provide clues to help student better understand what he is supposed to do.

4.       Focus on explaining the key terms in the text or texts.

5.       Address main arguments and assumptions related to each text.

6.       Each text’s argument should be characterized accurately.

7.       Provided from texts evidence should be evaluated in order to presents each texts:

a)      strengths and weaknesses

b)      list the mentioned above in their relation to the other texts

c)       address the plausibility of the claim

d)      explain how texts “speak” to one another

e)      work on synthesizing them

f)       if synthesizing seems impossible, state the barriers

g)      if all texts tend to address only one side of the issue, consider addressing the other side too

h)      if text address different sides of issue, find agreement and disagreement

i)        look for the author’s omissions, raise counterarguments

j)        make sure to do all parts of the assignment