Could you write a response paper

Response Essay

In this, your response essay, you will summarize and then respond to the reading via one of the disciplinary perspectives from the Humanities commons (English, history, philosophy, or religious studies).

This response should engage with the text as a piece of the academic conversation, and your paper should itself constitute a contribution to this conversation.

A response is not simply a summary; you’ll summarize your sources in the process of making a response, but a response involves making a claim that goes beyond merely repeating what has already been said. You may, in the course of coming up with an angle for your response, begin by asking yourself any number of questions (this list is by no means required or exhaustive):  how does the text grapple with the history/histories relevant to the phenomena it examines?  What philosophy informs the author's writing?  What religious context does the text’s subject occupy?  How does the author examine language, and is their analysis accurate?  How does the article’s topic operate as a reflection of its time?  In what ways do the article’s subjects pose philosophical questions (or offer philosophical answers) to readers?  

Obviously, with so many questions available for examination (like I said, the prompts above are just examples, ask your own questions), your response can take many possible forms.  The details are up to you. What I am looking for is a clear, sharp-eyed engagement with the text, an inquiring mind about the validity text's argument, and a substantial contribution the academic conversation about electronic texts and online discourse.  Your paper should center around a specific, arguable, novel claim that you are making about the text and its subject or the author’s treatment of that subject.  This claim—your thesis statement—should tell the reader something they wouldn't know from a casual reading of the text, and it should be specific enough that it requires specific support—which you will supply in the paper as well. 

When the reader finishes your paper, they should understand something new not only about your chosen article but about the world around them.

Specs: --Minimum five full pages.  –

Minimum three external sources (that is, besides the article you pick from our assigned readings), four to five recommended.  Sources do not need to be particularly dense, or have a particularly in-depth connection to your paper, but they should be authoritative (i.e., you can cite brief facts to demonstrate your point, as opposed to discussing sources at length, but the sources should be academic, not the first thing you found off google.)

Sources should be cited in MLA style.

Because this is an academic paper and does not involve personal narrative, do not use the first person pronoun “ I.” (or “ we” or “ us” or the second person “ you.” )