Active Reading and the Prewriting Stage
Know Why You Are Writing Your Paper
Students are often assigned a response or reaction paper as an opportunity to carefully consider their thoughts and feelings about a text they have read. If this happens to you, you will first need to evaluate the strong and weak points of the text, and consider if the author accomplishes his or her objectives and, if so, how well they did it. Reaction papers are not merely an expression of the writer’s opinion. Rather, a paper of this type requires careful reading of a given text – the type of reading that goes below the surface. The writer is expected to respond or react to implied rather than expressed ideas, and then to analyze, valuate, and elaborate on the key points of the text and the purpose of the author. In most cases, reaction papers use the first person perspective.
When responding, you should use evidence from the given text to support your thoughts and ideas as well as providing your own thoughts and ideas on it. If your task is to agree or to disagree, you should use persuasive evidence to support your particular viewpoint.
If you are asked to respond to several texts, look at how these texts are connected. When giving your response to a single text, you should probably link that text to broad themes and concepts covered in class. You may be given these assignments for lectures, lab activities, site trips, movies, or even on things you discussed in class.
Reaction papers do not just sum-up a text. Neither do they simply state that the writer liked or disliked a book because it was (respectively) interesting or boring.
Understand What Is Being Asked in the Assignment
Before beginning, you need to understand what it is exactly your professor or tutor wants. Some tutors require you to analyze or evaluate a text and thus react to it. Others require your personal reaction. In the event you are not sure, ask your tutor for clarification.
If you are required to react to a text in relation to a separate text, you will need to use quotes from each text in your paper. If you are required to react to some theme from your class (e.g. you are required to read a text about gender roles in a Sociology class), you should read, make notes, and react according to how these roles are dealt with in the book. It may be that you are asked to give your personal reaction to the text in question. This method is not as common but, sometimes, tutors want to see if students have read and thought about a text.
- Read the assigned text immediately
To write a successful reaction paper, one should not merely read a text, give their opinion, and submit their paper. Rather, they should synthesize the given texts, a task that involves pulling the content together in order to analyze and/or evaluate it. To do this properly, you need to allow sufficient time to read and digest the content in order to combine your thoughts and ideas.
One common mistake among students is leaving the reading and reacting process to the final hour. However, reactions require a significant amount of consideration after several readings. Many texts need to be re-read several times. The first reading is for familiarization purposes and after that to think about your reaction(s) and the assignment itself.
- Make a note of your first reactions
After the first reading, and after every subsequent reading, write down your first reactions. After reading, ask yourself what you think, what you feel, what you see, what seems to be the case, and what your opinion of the text is.
- Mark the text while you are reading
While reading or re-reading the text, mark relevant parts or make annotations in the margins so that it is easy to find quotes, important parts of the plot, and other elements later. Failure to do this will make it difficult to write a cohesive paper.
- Questions to ask while you are reading
While reading, there are certain questions you should ask. This is the start of the evaluation and reaction process.
