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Your Guide To Writing A Reading Reaction Paper

A reading reaction paper allows students to analyze and express their thoughts on a text, focusing on significant details rather than summarizing the content. It should include personal insights and connections to the work as a whole, supported by specific examples. The paper is evaluated on its focus, depth, and variety of responses to encourage critical thinking and enhance classroom discussions.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
2 views2 pages

Your Guide To Writing A Reading Reaction Paper

A reading reaction paper allows students to analyze and express their thoughts on a text, focusing on significant details rather than summarizing the content. It should include personal insights and connections to the work as a whole, supported by specific examples. The paper is evaluated on its focus, depth, and variety of responses to encourage critical thinking and enhance classroom discussions.

Uploaded by

Sydney Carter
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Your Guide to Writing a Reading Reaction Paper

A reading reaction paper is your opportunity to demonstrate that you’ve read the assignment
and thought deeply about it; ideally, it should represent a mini-analysis of some part of the work
that struck you as important or meaningful. I encourage you to record and express any
thoughts, questions, and/or concerns that come up as you read, and thus develop independent
ideas about a text. Furthermore, your response should succinctly state what part of the work
you see as significant and then explain its relationship to the work as a whole. Don’t tell me
what happened or summarize the text. I’ve read the material and don’t need this information.
Instead, your focus should be explaining to me as clearly as possible how and why a certain
detail or incident shapes your analysis and is important to your overall understanding of the
work. Make certain that you support any generalizations with specifics and that you offer me
some less-than-obvious insight as a reward for reading your reaction paper!

All I ask of you is a certain degree of care and focus. Pay attention to the text and choose
something to write. Don’t worry about the length; instead, worry about saying something
worthwhile. Be clear about what you are saying, and communicate what fascinates or troubles
you. ​Remember that a response is not just about what you like or don’t like -- you may
begin with feelings, but you do not end there. Try to make sense of the text.

Reading reaction papers provide several valuable services for me: They help me insure that you
do the reading and help me assess your level of understanding and the depth of your thinking;
they help me monitor your writing skills; they improve the level of our classroom discussion. Of
course, they also take up a lot of my time, but they’re worth the effort for all of us in the end.

I’ve provided you with a guide to get you started below. These steps to analysis are loosely
adapted from ​Writing and Thinking Analytically​ by David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen,
Harcourt, 2000, a book that I highly recommend.

Examples of possible types of responses:

1. Focus on a small part: Discuss one sentence or passage in detail and explain its
significance for the whole or find two key sentences or passages and discuss their
relationship.

2. Assemble pieces of evidence: Locate three “hotspots” from the text (passages that
seem important, striking, puzzling) and suggest what they might show individually or
together.

3. Formulate overarching ideas, themes, or problems: Devise a good question, explain


why the answer is not so obvious, and then try to answer it by finding three apt passages
or locate and define a theme or main subject of the text.
4. Revise or complicate: Give a raw response, then either analyze it for your own
assumptions, values, expectations, or after rereading, give a second response
complicating or refuting what you first thought.

5. Define significant parts and how they’re related: Try to figure out what rhetorical tools
the writer uses and how those tools help us understand the meaning of the subject as a
whole.

6. Make the Implicit Explicit: Convert meanings that are suggested but not overtly stated
to direct statements.

7. Look for Patterns: Seek out repetitions or resemblances, contrasts, or anomalies. The
latter are especially important for they help us refine our claims and keep us from
ignoring evidence; they often lead us to new and better questions and ideas.

8. Keep reformulating questions and explanations; REMEMBER, uncertainty is a normal


and necessary part of understanding.

A. Which details seem significant? Why?

B. What is the significance of a particular idea? What does it mean?

C. What else might it mean?

D. How do the details fit together? What do they have in common?

E. What does this pattern of details mean?

F. What else might this same pattern of details mean? How else could it be
explained?

G. What details don’t seem to fit? How might they be connected with other details
to form a different pattern?

H. What does this new pattern mean? How might it cause me to read the
meaning of the individual details differently?

Your reading reaction papers will be scored based on their focus and depth. You should attempt
a variety of responses (ie, if you write the same sort of response every time, you will see your
scores drop as you are not challenging your brain or offering anything new or unique for
consideration to the group.)

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