Step By Step Guide For Creating A Proper Response Essay

A response essay offers a formal review or twist of an artwork, article or book. You should write response essays in the first person, offering your view to the work. Often after summarizing a literature piece, you may be required to respond to it. What you are supposed to do is to offer a subjective opinion on the piece and you can include your opinion as well as personal experience.

When writing your response, it is important to be specific and support the points that you make. Consider what you are responding to the essay. Why do you agree or disagree with the point of view? Writing a response essay is almost similar to writing an argument essay. This is because in an argument essay, you are supposed to lay out a debatable claim or thesis to support a wide range of evidence. You should support every point in your response with a personal example while giving facts or examples from your research.

Common ways to respond to the essay

You can respond to an essay in various ways. Here are a few of them.

• You can choose to agree/disagree with the thesis or key point or view of the author. This should be the root of your response
• Agree/ disagree with the extent of making the thesis
• Agree/disagree with certain evidence that is used to support the thesis
• Agree/disagree with how relevant the entire topic is

Steps to follow

The first step towards writing your response essay will be to assess the items that you have been given to observe. You will then be required to add your personal impression or reaction to that report. After this step, you will be required to:

• Re-read the piece to get an initial understanding
• Record your impressions and thoughts in some notes
• Develop your thesis
• Write the outline
• Create the essay.

Writing the response essay

Start with a very strong introductory sentence. Do not feel shy about expressing your opinion in the paper even though you may feel strange expressing opinions such as “I believe” or “I feel”. In fact, this is what the instructor is looking for. Therefore, feel free to sue words such as:

• According to my opinion
• What I did not like
• I didn’t see a connection between
• We can conclude that
• The part I liked most
• What I did not like at all

Consider the response essay as some kind of a review.