Instructions for writing your response paper

Due: As announced in class

Choose one of the following poems, then follow the instructions below.

• "The Seafarer"
• "The Dream of the Rood"
• "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tinturn Abbey"
• "The Lady of Shalott"
• "The Goblin Market"

For any of these poems, you will undoubtedly find lots of explanatory material on line. Feel free to use that -- if necessary -- to make yourself more comfortable. But I am not looking for, and will not reward, any mass produced interpretation of the poem. In fact, I am not looking for an interpretation of the poem at all. I am looking for a personal response; an expression of your personal encounter with the poem.

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 six step process provided below, 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:

• What was significant?
• What do I remember?
• What did I react to (like/dislike)?
• Was there something I did not understand? (And what did I do about it? How did understanding it change my response the poem?)

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, that it communicates a single, central idea to your reader.

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.

Step 6: Finish with an introductory paragraph.

Write a second introduction, this time based not on what you planned to say in your paper but on what you actually said in your paper. A writer needs an introduction to tell her or him what s/he thinks s/he will write: to help her or him get started. But what you write deserves an introduction based on what it actually is, not on what you thought it was going to be. Think of it this way: if someone were to introduce you to me, would you want them to introduce you as you are now, or as you were as a two-year-old diaper-wearing tantrum-throwing brat? We can all predict that everyone of us will go through that two-year-old brat phase, but no one could have predicted you would become the thoughtful, intelligent, open-minded university student you are now. Show your paper--your own work!--at east that much respect. In short, while your (writer's) introduction needs to be the first thing you write, your (reader's) introduction should be the last thing you write.

Specific, formatting, Instructions (upon which will be based the rest of your grade):

1. Be sure to follow all the following instructions, as this will show me both that you are able to read, process, and follow instructions, and that you care enough about your own work to suggest I ought to care about helping you improve.


2. Give your paper a meaningful, communicative title. Remember, the title of the poem belongs to the poem, not to your paper.


3. Demonstrate some personality along with the intelligence you demonstrate by following the general instructions above.


4. Proofread your paper, or have a friend do so, so that all the stupid mistakes (mistakes you could have and should have caught but didn't) are removed before I see the paper.


5. Aim to submit a paper three or four pages long. Blaise Pascal once wrote "Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte," which can be translated as "I have made it longer because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter." In an act of further translation, I am going to translate "loisir" as time rather than as leisure, and that will lead me to conclude that you did not take sufficient time to edit your work, in the event you submit something too long. Should you find yourself with fewer than three pages as the deadline approaches, do this: think harder.


6. Have your name on the first page of the paper, and put a number on every page after the first page--even if you have to do so by hand.


7. Staple your pages together. Seriously. Do it. Your grade will suffer if you overlook this step.


8. If you do consult some external source, be it paper or electronic, be sure to cite it. Do so in accordance with the Brief Guide to MLA Style found via the foregoing link or via (with a lot of digging) the Vaughn Memorial Library website.


9. Single space your title and name, then double space everything after that.


10. Use a main-stream font such as Helvetica, Times, Times New Roman, Calibri, or Cambria, and size it to 12-points. You will get approximately 300 words per page with any of these fonts in that size.


11. Set your margins to about 2.5 cm top, bottom, and both sides. I see a lot of student papers, and can tell at a glance when someone is trying to stuff too many or too few words onto a page.


12. Sample Paper

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