William Rodney Herring's Courses

Instructions for Response Papers

Over the course of the semester, you will respond in writing to many of our readings. In thinking about the content of your response, you will above all want to write about the issue or issues that most interest(s) you. In the event that you are stumped, you should email me well in advance of when the paper is due to ask for a prompt. I will often provide you with a question or two in class for your consideration.

Content
In general, you will want to use this opportunity to do one of three things. First, you may want to put the text in question along side another text that we’ve read and see what ideas emerge. For instance, how is the writer Bartleby (he’s a scrivener) like the writer Howells calls the “man of letters”? What does the fact that both of these men write for a living help us discover about these texts? Another option is to consider the text in the context of the prevailing questions in our course. So: to the extent that Richard Rodriguez fashions himself as an individual, what does he assume or mean by the term “individual”? Your third option would be to close-read a section of the text that you find troubling or enlightening or unexpectedly representative of larger issues in the text. A variant of this option would be to try to answer a question that seems to plague the text. So for example, a student in a former class asserted that Douglass’s first four chapters are redundant, the point being that slaves were treated badly, which Douglass just reiterates like 14 times. If that were the case, why would anyone would find this book interesting? I asked the student to see what else might be going on. By asking, “Is this redundant?”, the student was able to consider the nuances of the repeated mistreatments in the early chapters—and ultimately to see a development, a structure to Douglass’s argument, which only strengthened Douglass’s claim. (If it isn’t clear, the answer to the question is no.)

Format
We will have two groups of respondents. On a given date, one group of students will post response papers, and the other students will respond to the papers with comments. On the next due date, these roles will reverse.

Each response paper will be a minimum of 300 words. You will post the paper as a blog entry on our course web site. Your response paper should use quotations from the text, and for each quote you include, you must use a parenthetical citation indicating which page the quotation comes from. I will assume you are citing the edition of the text that I have ordered in the bookstore, unless you indicate otherwise, and since your readers may consult these citations, it is important that you let us know which edition you are using (if it’s not ours) and that you cite accurately.

On the dates when your group is not writing response papers, you will read all other students’ papers, and you will comment on TWO of them. Your comments should engage the substantive matter of your classmate’s paper, not her style or mechanics.

Additionally, if you are in the group posting papers, you will reply to at least one comment.

N.B. Your comments are required, and if you neglect to post them, you will receive a zero for that response paper.

Grading
I’m looking for content and effort on these papers, though your grammar and style will be polished so as to make both you (the author) and me and your classmates (your audience) proud. These papers will demonstrate that you have read and that you have thought about the text and that you have tried to place the work in the context of our course. At the end of the semester, your response paper grade—which is 20% of your total grade—will be the average of your grades on each of these papers.

Due Dates
The due dates appear on the syllabus. Typically, your paper must appear on your blog at 7:00 pm the day before the class when we will discuss the text. We need this much time for two reasons: one, I want to read through your responses before planning the next day’s discussion, and two, you need time to read through each other’s responses before commenting. Your comment on a peer’s response paper must be posted by 10:00 pm.