Please work with our course WA on your reading response! She will update reading response consultations weekly throughout the semester; sign up early!

 

Once during the semester, you will each write a brief essay (1-2 pages, double-spaced) that reflects on the assigned readings for the day on which you sign up, and especially with how they help us address one or more of the central concerns of the course: a) writing’s role in constructing and maintaining social identities, b) how writing is entangled in societal expectations for and understandings of appropriateness, conventionality, and value, and/or c) how scholars in Writing Studies reveal, resist, and teach about and around writing’s dominating effects. 

 

These responses are also an opportunity for you to make connections between readings for the class, research you are doing, and personal experience. That is, these responses should both synthesize and speculate, which means they should draw attention to the relationship(s) between ideas explored in the course as well as provide avenues for further engagement (such as asking questions). They are an invitation to work deeply with the texts we’ve read and build personal and academic connections with, between, and among them. 

 

These response essays serve two main purposes: 1) they help you engage with the readings on both a personal and academic level, which may help you in the development of your first writing project (not to mention subsequent ones), and 2) they give you practice in a couple common, useful, and often surprisingly elusive skills: articulating points of engagement with other scholars while also advancing a claim of your own and writing in a way that is simultaneously scholarly and accessible.

 

To that end, there are three main objectives you reading response must achieve in order to earn a Pass: 

• Articulation of a relationship/ connection between an assigned text/ course material and one or more of the central concerns of the course: a) writing’s role in constructing and maintaining social identities, b) how writing is entangled in societal expectations for and understandings of appropriateness, conventionality, and value, and/or c) how scholars in Writing Studies reveal, resist, and teach about and around writing’s dominating effects. In so doing, you advance a claim of your own.
• Engagement with the readings on both a personal and academic level, which may include personal reactions to texts, text-to-text connections, relating course material to research you are doing, asking questions, etc. In so doing, your response will be both synthetic and speculative.
• Writing in a way that is simultaneously scholarly and accessible.

Submission Guidelines

On the days that you’ve signed up for a response essay, please upload it to our moodle site no later than 9:00 am so that I have time to review it before class. I may use content from your response essays to guide class discussion.

 

• File uploads: All files should be uploaded as a single document.
• File format: All uploaded files must be submitted in doc, docx, or pdf format only.
• Document formatting: You must follow MLA formatting guidelines (see syllabus).

 

Meeting these requirements and guidelines is your responsibility. Missing elements will result in grade penalties; submissions with improper file types will not be graded. Note that, because your instructor is only human, I may not see a problem until I am ready to grade your submission. Your assignment will only be “on time” if it is both on time and something I can open.