Summary and response paper

Ways to Respond

A. Responding to the Rhetorical Situation

1. Examine the rhetorical situation for the text you’re responding to. How well does the author respond to this situation? For example, will the author engage every member of the audience, or will some members of the audience be unmoved by the author’s ideas? Why or why not?

2. Determine the impact the author’s writing style has. For example, if an author depends on sarcasm for humor, does that sarcastic tone turn any readers away? If so, is the author then unable to achieve his or her purpose?

3. Describe the visuals in the article (if there are any). Are they manipulative? Fitting? Why or why not?

B. Responding to the Ideas

1. Examine the author’s assumptions. State which you agree with (if any) and which you disagree with (if any). Support your answers.

2. Consider the currency of the sources. If the source should be up to date, is it? If it is supposed to give a historical perspective, does it?

3. Decide whether the research reported in the source is thorough enough. Is anything missing?

4. Consider whether the research is reliable. Are the results accurate? Could the research be replicated? If it were replicated, would it produce the same results?

5. Examine the author’s reasoning. Faulty reasoning may be the result of providing contradictory claims, appealing to the reader's emotions, or trying to pass off a non-expert as an authority. Faulty reasoning is often discussed in terms of rhetorical (or logical) fallacies.

C. Responding from Personal Experience

1. Describe personal experiences that support or call into question the author’s thesis, claims, or assumptions.

2. Describe how you were personally affected by the article—what did you learn?

D. Responding by Doing Your Own Research

1. If the article or essay deals with a particular company, organization, or political party, review information on the entity's official website.

2. Check to see whether the author has posted any information on his or her own website.

3. Look for governmental websites that provide information on the issue.

4. Go to the library’s homepage and click on Databases > Databases by Title. You may be able to find sources by using LexisNexis Academic, CQ Researcher, or other relevant databases. If you follow links, you can often find a full-text version, which means that it's online and you can print it out.

E. Blend A-D