I have copied the following set of instructions from a Lund University page on the genre of Response Papers in Academic Writing in English. The largest portion of your grade will be based on my global assessment of how well you seem to have followed these instructions.
They are appropriate for this assignment, and I will be able to tell from what you submit whether you followed these instructions or simply adopted some explanatory goop on the paper from someone or somewhere else. If you make that mistake, you will receive an F (0) for the assignment, with no opportunity to re-submit. The penalty far out-weighs any possible reward, so don't lean on anyone else (except in the manner explained in class). Just follow the instructions, write your own paper, and earn your own grade. Remember: you are here for the education achieved by doing the work, not for the grade based on the product produced.
After the five step process provided by the anonymous educator(s) at Lund, you will find a second list of specific formatting instructions for your paper. Be sure to follow them, too.
Step 1: Pre-writing activities (i.e. what to do before you start writing)
As you read the text on which you are to base your response paper, mark sections that strike you as important and make notes. One way of doing that is to keep a reading journal where you write down your reactions and ideas as you read. These notes will be helpful in deciding what to focus on in your response paper.
Step 2: Decide on a topic
When deciding what to write about in your response paper, look at your notes, your underlinings, etc. To find a focus, try to establish what interested you in the text(s). One way of defining a suitable topic is to ask questions about the text(s) you have read:
Step 3: Starting to write: Open with an introductory paragraph
When you have decided what to focus on, write an introductory passage where you introduce the text(s). Here, you tell the reader which text(s) by which author(s) you will be discussing in your response paper. In this paragraph you should also clearly state what you will focus on in your response paper. Make sure that the title of your response paper is informative.
Step 4: Writing the body of the response paper
After the introductory paragraph comes the body of the text, which is the part of the essay where you will discuss the topic you have chosen. Divide your essay into paragraphs. Remember to start a new paragraph when you begin to discuss something new. Since the response paper is such a short paper, there is usually no need for headings in the text.
Step 5: Writing the conclusion
End your response paper with a concluding paragraph, where you sum up what you have said and draw some conclusion. Like the introduction, the conclusion should be brief – a few sentences will usually do.
Here again is the source for the global instructions for this assignment:Lund University Response Paper description
Here is a page that also gives a useful account of how to write a Response paper. You might consult this page should any of the instructions provided by the page at Lund University seem at all cryptic to you.Study.com Response Paper advice