– Response Essay Examples –
Response Essay: Writing a response essay might seem like a challenging task at first. Firstly, you need to understand to a great extent what the study that you are responding to is talking about and then make sure that you write an insightful, true-to-the-source essay about it.
Even if you need to write a response essay as part of your homework for faculty studies or high school assignments or you want to exercise your argumentative skills, it might seem like a lot of work at first. However, having in mind a clear structure of your future response essay is essential.
Most of the time when you are tasked with an essay about a book or article you’ve read for a class, you will be expected to write in a and impersonal voice. But the regular rules change a bit when you write a response paper.
A response (or reaction) paper differs from the formal review primarily in that it is written in the first person. Unlike in more formal writing, the use of phrases like “I thought” and “I believe” is encouraged in a response paper.
You’ll still have a thesis and will need to back up your opinion with from the work, but this type of paper spotlights your reaction as a reader or viewer.
A Brief Summary of a Response Essay
Response Essay Examples: Keeping everything in mind, the essential parts of a response essay and the main suggestions that you have to keep in mind when starting to write are:
Introduction
➛ Paragraph 1: The first part of the introduction needs to be vivid, catchy, and reflect the point you are about to make.
➛ Paragraph 2: Provide a context to your response essay: details about the source-text and the author and what the main points in the article are.
Body
➛ State your position regarding the ideas presented in the introduction and if you agree with the author’s take on the matter or not.
➛ Mention if you are going to question the author’s position or expand on the author’s account of the facts.
➛ Give clear arguments pro or against the matter and allocate one to each of these arguments.
➛ Use statistics, story-telling, research findings, scientific discoveries, and any other tools suggested in this article.
Conclusion
➛ Provide an insightful and catchy conclusion that correlates with the introduction you have chosen for your response essay.
Get Started: Writing an Introduction
One important thing when writing a response essay is the way you structure the introduction. This is one of the key parts of your essay, as it embodies the topic you are about to debate and the premises you are basing your essay on. The introduction will make your audience decide if they want to keep reading your response essay or not. This is why you must keep in mind the following tips:
➛ An introduction is all about catching your audience’s attention
➛ It should provide a brief description of the topic
➛ You should be able to briefly summarize your thesis
➛ Don’t forget to give a short description of the author and the article you are responding to.
It might be the case that the source article that you are about to discuss contains several parts or has different ideas which can be debated and your response article refers only to a part of them.
In this case, don’t forget to also mention this. Do not forget that you need to keep it short and catchy. keep reading Response Essay Examples.
A Sample Response or Reaction Paper
For more insight on Response Essay Examples, here is a report was written by a student in an introductory psychology course. Look at the paper closely to see how it follows the guidelines for report writing described above.
Dr. Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning () is both an autobiographical account of his years as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps and a presentation of his ideas about the meaning of life.
The three years of deprivation and suffering he spent at Auschwitz and other Nazi camps led to the development of his theory of Logotherapy, which, very briefly, states that the primary force in human beings is “a striving to find a meaning in one’s life” (154).
Without a meaning in life, Frankl feels, we experience emptiness and loneliness that lead to apathy and despair. This need for meaning was demonstrated to Frankl time and again with both himself and other prisoners who were faced with the horrors of camp existence.
Frankl was able to sustain himself partly through the love he felt for his wife. In a moment of spiritual insight, he realized that his love was stronger and more meaningful than death, and would be a real and sustaining force within him even if he knew his wife was dead.
Frankl’s comrades also had reasons to live that gave them strength. One had a child waiting for him; another was a scientist who was working on a series of books that needed to be finished. Finally, Frankl and his friends found meaning through their decision to accept and bear their fate with courage.
He says that the words of Dostoevsky came frequently to mind: “There is one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my suffering.” When Frankl’s prison experience was over and he returned to his profession of psychiatry, he found that his theory of meaning held true not only for the prisoners but for all people. He has since had great success in working with patients by helping them locate in their own lives’ meanings of love, work, and suffering.
One of my reactions to the book was the relationship I saw between the “Capos” and ideas about anxiety, standards, and aggression discussed in our psychology class. The Capos were prisoners who acted as trustees, and Frankl says they acted more cruelly toward the prisoners than the guards or the SS men. Several psychological factors help explain this cruelty.
The Capos must have been suppressing intense anxiety about “selling themselves out” to the Nazis in return for small favors. Frankl and other prisoners must have been a constant reminder to the Capos of the
courage and integr
ity they themselves lacked. When our behaviors and values are threatened by someone else acting in a different way, one way we may react is with anger and aggression. The Capos are an extreme example of how, if the situation is right, we may be capable of great cruelty to those whose actions threaten our standards.
I think that Frankl’s idea that meaning is the most important force in human beings helps explain some of the disorder and discontent in the world today. Many people are unhappy because they are caught in jobs where they have no responsibility and creativity; their work lacks meaning.
Many are also unhappy because our culture seems to stress sexual technique in social relationships rather than human caring. People buy popular books that may help them become better partners in bed, but that may not make them more sensitive to each other’s human needs.
Where there is no real care, there is no meaning. To hide the inner emptiness that results from impersonal work and sex, people busy themselves with the accumulation of material things.
With television sets, stereos, cars, expensive clothes, and the like, they try to forget that their lives lack true meaning instead of working or going to school to get a meaningful job, or trying to be decent human beings.
I have also found that Frankl’s idea that suffering can have meaning helps me understand the behavior of people I know. I have a friend named Jim who was always poor and did not have much of a family—only a stepmother who never cared for him as much as for her own children.
What Jim did have, though, was determination. He worked two jobs to save money to go to school, and then worked and went to school at the same time. The fact that his life was hard seemed to make him bear down all the more.
On the other hand, I can think of a man in my neighborhood who for all the years I’ve known him has done nothing with his life. He spends whole days smoking and looking at cars going by. He is a burned-out case. Somewhere in the past his problems must have become too much for him, and he gave up.
He could have found meaning in his life by deciding to fight his troubles like Jim, but he didn’t, and now he is a sad shadow of a man. Without determination and the desire to face his hardships, he lost his chance to make his life meaningful.
In conclusion, I would strongly recommend Frankl’s book to persons who care about why they are alive, and who want to truly think about the purpose and meaning of their lives
That’s it on Response Essay Examples, I hope you learned one or two from it. I also believe that you will make it on the real deal as you go to tackle it. Do well to also share with your friends.
StudentsandScholarship Team.
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