Reading Response Assignment

MINIMUM 3 PAGES

This assignment is meant to be a personal essay, a personal response to some part

or parts of our reading so far in English 1B. This assignment offers you a venue, a place

and time, to write about your emotional and intellectual responses. Since this is a short

exercise—only three full double-spaced typed pages or so—I recommend that you focus

what you share in your response and do not attempt to respond to everything. You may

want to focus on what has sparked or elicited the strongest responses—emotionally and

intellectually—in what we’ve read.

What I will be looking for in this assignment is your deep thought in your

responses, your knowledge of the reading you refer to, and your ability to express things

about the stories and/or poems that pertain specifically to you. This is not an

argument—it is rather your thoughtful, developed response to what you’ve read: what

these stories or these poems have made you think about, what the reading has made you

feel, and what you have learned or discovered while reading it.

For this assignment, you may use any of the material we’ve read so far or will

have read up to the due-date for this exercise, all the way from the first week’s poem on

the board, “Suicide’s Note,” to Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, and through Book 8 of

Homer’s Iliad. Feel free to focus your response in relation to a specific story, to a set of

stories, to a moment or set of moments in a story, and/or to a poem or poems; feel free to

pull parts or moments from different stories and poems to aid you in expressing your

personal responses. I’m looking more for depth than for breadth of response, though, as I

noted above.

Ideally, you’d identify what you’ll be responding to in your introduction, but I am

also inviting you to use whatever organization or structure that you think will best convey

your personal responses. Maybe you want to use a two-paragraph introduction? Maybe

you want to use a surprise twist for effect in the middle or near the end? As I wrote

above, I’m interested in a depth of response anchored in your knowledge of the reading.

Other advice? Be specific; quote and paraphrase as needed. Explore and share.

(One caution: Don’t just repeat material from your take-home recommendation essay.)