how do you write a reaction paper

how do you write a reaction paper

Effective Strategies for Writing a Reaction Paper

1. Introduction to Reaction Papers

When you write a response paper in a writing course, your professor might ask you to respond to a style manual or a craft book about writing. A response paper needs you to examine a piece of writing or a subject very carefully and come up with a great deal of thought. In fact, when you write a response or reaction paper, you will use research just like you would in any other research paper, but you will also use many resources from your own experience in doing so.

Writing a reaction paper is a common activity in many college courses and activities. These assignments require going beyond summarizing what you have read. Of course, summarizing a book or a play can be very useful in showing your understanding of the material. However, for many students, this activity just seems like busy work. Moreover, many students are concerned about what they do not understand. However, in a reaction paper, what you feel and think matters a great deal. These important points may not be clear enough to avoid misunderstanding of the essay, so this essay suggests some strategies to help students write better reaction papers.

2. Key Components of a Reaction Paper

Begin with one or two detailed paragraphs about the material. The structure of your outline should help you look at the details of your evaluation. Include your opinion of the full report—its rational unit and execution. Be flat and crucial. Be sure not to say too much or too little.

The reaction papers include a covering page, summary, and reaction paragraph, and your assessment of the writing ability.

Reaction papers are intended to encourage students to systematically consider the material and express their opinion about its topic. Think of these essays as an opportunity to talk directly and personally to your teacher. They are also a great way to challenge your critical thinking. When writing reaction papers, remember to ask yourself what you share with the material: Don’t be content just to be in agreement or disagreement with organized thought. Draw your attention to important issues and patterns. Consider the analysis and criticism. What, in your opinion, are the author’s intentions?

Personal Opinion

Writing a list of your thoughts after reading a piece or hearing a lecture is a useful way to re-emphasize points that you already know and to consider your impression about the material in a new context. The exercise of criticizing the book or article is not the same as a book review, although the list can be an essential preliminary step for writing that type of essay. The process of responding to a reading and evaluating the reaction is a great way to clarify your thoughts in practice. It allows you to clarify your thinking so that you can persuade the other parties to disagree. Follow the ideas below to get comfortable with the reaction paper.

Reaction papers have two key components: the summary and the reaction. The summary section should provide a brief overview of the material that will be informative for readers. Keep in mind that the summary should be brief—write only what is necessary to let the reader understand your reaction. The summary should take up no more than one-third of your essay. The remainder of your essay should discuss your perception of the book or article. This section can be presented in lists with short statements, not completeness.

3. Structuring Your Reaction Paper

2) Reaction or response papers are usually requested by teachers so that you’ll consider carefully what you think or feel about something you’ve read. The following guidelines are intended to be used for reacting to a reading, although they could easily be used for reactions to films too. A good response paper will artfully make a connection between the subject at hand and your own experience. Your work on the response/reaction essays is usually lengthy because it is not all about just reading, but it is also about deep rhetorical analysis and synthesis of the intellectual abilities and your general knowledge.

1) Background An effective writing procedure makes your paper logical and understandable. A response or reaction essay, as it is understood from the name, is written in response to something – to a book, a movie, a musical track, a speech, a drawing, a new trend in fashion, a new marketing strategy, and many others. Of course, such tasks are not so simple to accomplish, and that is why they usually cause a lot of stress and obstacles. This is the reason why you need professional help and guidance when writing this kind of paper.

Introduction The flow, organization, and presentation of the details in your essay will significantly determine how effectively your paper will carry your message home. The delivery or the writing style of your paper should follow the academic standards and should be effective enough for the listeners to easily understand and follow so that they can get the maximum benefit from your work.

4. Tips for Writing a Strong Conclusion

Though, it should be presented in a most compelling manner, be specific, clear, as well as engaging. The sources of evidence that the paper should have are the article, the textbook, and the dictionary. Then after you have established yourself, the assignment demanded work. Returning to the argumentative essay example, builders made models of individual parts of the Roman Coliseum out of toothpicks and marshmallows, simple but very effective. Initiating peer-editing sessions, given helpful guidelines, and having students edit the class may have trouble in getting to the reader or meeting the requirement list. Read sample reaction papers and devote all of a class or two discussing the formatting, conventions, length, and style issues that the student have.

The conclusion is an essential part of the reaction paper since it is your opportunity to summarize the article along with your response. If you are going to be writing a lot of reaction papers, it’s a good idea to craft a general conclusion that you can use as a model. Here are some suggestions for the elements you might include. First, think of the most important points that writers made in the article. These would be your topic sentences. Generalize the point to make a broader claim. For example, consider how the knowledge from the article needs to be mined for insight. Point out the different possibilities for application in related or diverse areas. Then explain why the reader should possibly care and how can this new knowledge potentially benefit society.

5. Examples and Analysis of Well-Written Reaction Papers

With a thesis perhaps more prominent than implicitly stated, a more explicit comparison of the different levels of unwilling readers, and a rhetorically versatile writer, the piece would not only be good, but exceptional.

Another recommendation for the piece is to make sure to avoid straw manning, or to not exaggerate an opposing argument to make the jump to refuting a belief that is not really held by most. Mr. Graff does some straw manning inadvertently, I feel, in the end of paragraph six. “Most of my students, who are college seniors, do not arrive as abysmally unprepared for college work in history, as Terman’s students who tested at the third-grade level, but I could not assign the article about closing the gap without beginning with basic advice on how to read if I wanted the students to understand it.” A more potent and exact comparison could maybe make the two sets of unwilling readers feel more similar, as though one generation didn’t stray far from another in the core of the problem.

I really couldn’t see any outright flaws in the piece. The arguments were backed up, telling the reader some of the most important components for solid claims, and the word choice made everything that much more urgent. The only thing I would have liked to see have been a bolded thesis. I believe that the thesis of a piece should be obvious, without the reader having to sift through or be quite perceptive to sense.

He certainly builds on his own credibility. He garners it in a few ways. First, he uses slightly convoluted language. This works to show that an important message deserves serious diction. Therefore, his word choice gives his arguments credibility. He writes, “Being able to read Playboy with comprehension is taking on a new meaning,” in explaining how little most students can comprehend. While this should be taken literally, it certainly holds truth. Also, his use of his own personal data, not stone-cold numbers or percentages, also helps him to build credibility. He says that out of twenty-eight college seniors on his campus, twenty-two could not understand the newspaper article, seven couldn’t understand the paper, and four couldn’t understand “trashy” texts. These are perhaps some of the most effective data points he could have picked. Third, he cites some sources. In an article that challenges higher-education teaching, a little background signaling that others agree with him gives him more weight. He quotes a 1999 Stanford report, the creator of a flashy-sounding training regime, and a UCLA professor. This use of data suggests that he is not the only one who thinks that college students are unprepared for higher literacy expectations. As a result, the combination of evidence–personal data from his thirty-five years of teaching, outside sources, and incredibly linguistic care on his part–really bolsters his arguments. I found them at first to be strong authorial choices, and my thinking hasn’t changed in that regard.

I found Gerald Graff’s piece that I just read to be quite persuasive. In it, he critiques an approach to literacy education that claims “the goal of literacy is to read self-help manuals without assistance.” He is not trying to make the case that all students need and should be interested in very intellectually challenging questions, but that they are indeed not even given the chance to think on that level. An example he gives is that his first-year students can’t read a newspaper article written at a level that even the high school students he teaches can access. This is indicative as he points to the test scores which actually peak in elementary, and derogate as the students get older. He uses anecdotes, his own data, and outside sources to make his point that something has to be done to meet this crippling problem of weak literacy head-on.

16 Feb. 2012