5 paragraph essay response to literature
While writing essays on your own is a common practice in education, there are situations that require you to write a piece describing the impact a particular published paper had on you, when you read it. These are called response essays and they can come in many forms, all of which can be found on the web. Construction of this type of essay can be done easily by adhering to the following, simple guideline:. This is a statement that completely identifies the purpose of your essay. When writing this type of paper, you should have a direction of analysis, or a point you wish to prove and the thesis statement contains this idea in a single sentence. Your sentence must be direct, clear and must deal with a single aspect of the passage, which you will then proceed to support by presenting relevant evidence as contained in the original document.
How to Write a Reading Response Essay with Sample Papers
Virginia has been a university English instructor for over 20 years. She specializes in helping people write essays faster and easier. Your introduction will be paragraphs. For this essay, because you want to give both information about the subject and also briefly summarize the article you are responding to, you probably need at least two paragraphs. In all introductions, you want to:. Paragraph One. The way this works is that you tell half of a story or conversation in the introduction and then tell the rest of the story in the conclusion.
Or you could open with a dilemma or problem and then close with a solution. Another approach is to retell the same story in the conclusion with a different usually better ending. How to Become a Republican. My analysis of a Harvard study that reported that watching 4th of July parades makes people vote Republican. Paragraph 2 : After your introduction, transition by explaining what the author of the article you have written has to say about this topic.
Briefly explain the main points of the article that you want to talk about. Then you will give your thesis. Johnson gives statistics showing that talking on a cell phone is as dangerous as driving drunk. Moreover, she points out the increasing number of accidents caused by cell phone use. Her conclusion is that we need to personally decide not to use a cell phone while driving and that we need to educate our friends and family to give up cell phones while driving, too.
Agree I agree with Johnson because I have observed many people driving dangerously while talking on cell phones and have even been in an accident myself while talking on the phone. Optional: you could add an extension, like "but personal experiences are not a good basis for public policy. We need to have laws prohibiting the use of cell phones while driving.
Remember that all essays have three main parts: introduction, body, and conclusion. There are many ways to write a good essay, but I will give you a general guide to follow which will help you to organize your ideas. Here you will argue your thesis and give support for your ideas from your personal experience and your own thinking and reading. A sample list is below. Contrary to what you may have learned in previous writing classes, you should not repeat or summarize your arguments in the conclusion.
Instead, you need to actually conclude your arguments. You can often use the same type of technique that you use in an introduction.
You can also:. Paragraph 1 : Dramatic re-telling of a personal story of picking up my cell phone and then realizing that I am going to crash into another car.
Stop the story right before the crash. Paragraph 2 : Like most people, I thought I was a good enough driver to handle using a cell phone while driving. I found out I was wrong. According to Johnson, we should not use our phones while driving and should educate others not to use them either. Johnson cites statistics showing that talking on a cell phone is as dangerous as driving drunk. Her conclusion is that we need to personally decide not to use a cell phone while driving and that we need to educate our friends and family to give up using cell phones while driving too.
Each of these statements would be the topic sentence of one of the body paragraphs. For the first one, I also give examples of the type of arguments and support I would use to write that paragraph and prove my point.
Laws make people realize that cell phone driving is dangerous. Below is an example of some support I could use to back up this idea—you can use ideas from the article but do not repeat the article. I would return to my personal story and pick it up where I left off.
I do crash and there is a lot of damage to my car, but no one is hurt. End with an appeal to the reader to do the same, but to also support legislation to prohibit cell phone use while driving. Responding personally to an article is usually the start of any analysis of writing, so it is a good first paper type to write. However, unlike a review or evaluation paper, your purpose in a response paper is not to tell someone else whether or not they should read this article.
Instead, your purpose is to explain your reaction and to give reasons this will be the body of your paper why you reacted that way. Doing an evaluation paper would take the reading response a step further and is probably one of the papers you will do next in your course. My reading response paper is about a short story that we read in our class. Our assignment is to write a response to the story and express our opinion, Can you explain how to do this?
I'm glad you've asked whether a reading response paper can be about a piece of literature. You can actually use many of the same techniques in writing about a short story as you do in writing about non-fiction articles.
Here is a step-by-step:. Begin your paper with a brief description of the story, using the author and full title of the story to start. Here is an example:. In the short story, "I'm Afraid of Bears" by Jon Junko, a young man in college named Ben goes on a camping trip with friends to overcome his fear of being outside which started when he was bit in the head by a bear while sleeping in a tent with his parents when he was eight.
Ben's journey on this camping trip parallels his journey through his fears to overcome them and includes End this paragraph with a thesis sentence which tells your main response and opinion about the story.
Junko's story is engaging, and his character of Ben is believable, authentic and relatable; moreover, I found the story suspenseful and was moved to think about how I needed to confront and overcome my fears. In this "roadmap thesis," you can give yourself and your reader an outline of everything you will be talking about in the paper. So turn these ideas into topic sentences. Conclude your paper with why you liked or did not like the story and maybe what you will continue to think about or do after having read the story.
If the class discussion also influenced you, you can talk about that as well. Where should a response-to-literature essay identify the author and title of the literary work being discussed? You need to identify the author and title of the literary work as soon as you start talking about them in your essay, which is usually in the introduction. Generally, you will also tell the main point of the literature at the same time, so you might want to put this at the end of the first paragraph or the beginning of the second paragraph.
You can put it in the very first sentence if it is a short essay, but generally, you may want to start with a bit more of an interesting introduction.
There is no particular word count required for this sort of paper. Your instructor will probably have this information for you. However, I usually assign at least a page essay to make sure the students do a thorough job.
Sign in or sign up and post using a HubPages Network account. Comments are not for promoting your articles or other sites. Hi Dae--what you are describing is a personal experience essay. You can find my instructions on that by Googling that title and my name. Is it the same process as the one demonstrated above? Excellent post!!!. The strategy you have posted on this technology helped me to get into the next level and had lot of information in it.
You should start by identifying the book and author and giving one sentence which tells your main reaction. Ideally, that sentence will tell two different ideas so you can do one in the first paragraph and the other in the second paragraph. You can tell what you liked and what you disliked, two things you liked, how you felt about the plot and how you felt about the way it was written, or two other aspects of the story. Then the rest of the first paragraph who talk about why I liked the female characters and what I liked about them.
The second paragraph would explain why l liked learning about 19th century England. It would help to conclude with what you learned from the book or how it changed your way of thinking about something.
Note: You should underline or italicize the title of a novel but I can't do that in the question widget. My task is to write a response to our favourite book in 2 paragraphs could you please help with that. Hi Ms. Virginia Thank you very much for this wonderful explanations. It is one of my favorite topics that has been explained clearly.
I once again appreciate your efforts. Hi Daisy, I'm very glad this is helping you and I hope you will look at my other articles for help on your assignments. Coming into my assignment, I was very nervous.
I've never written a reader-response paper. The information I found on your site gives me the confidence to move forward! Thanks so much! Virginia, thanks a lot for a very helpful article. Been searching for a while on how to write a synopsis on our assignment. Maria, I'm so glad that you found this article helpful to you. Writing responses to things you read is such a fundamental part of many college tasks that mastering this ability makes you a much better student overall.
Lynne thank you so much. This was extremely helpful. I like the fact that you added examples for a better understanding.
How Do You Write A Response To Literature Essay? While writing essays on your own is a common practice in education, there are situations that require you to. In this section you present the paragraphs (at least 3 paragraphs for a word essay) that support your thesis statement. Good literary analysis essays.
Virginia has been a university English instructor for over 20 years. She specializes in helping people write essays faster and easier. Your introduction will be paragraphs. For this essay, because you want to give both information about the subject and also briefly summarize the article you are responding to, you probably need at least two paragraphs.
English Essay Writing Tips. Part Two.
Still, teaching students to organize essays into the five-paragraph format is an easy way to introduce them to writing literary criticism, which will be tested time and again throughout their primary, secondary, and further education. The introduction is the first paragraph in your essay, and it should accomplish a few specific goals: capture the reader's interest, introduce the topic, and make a claim or express an opinion in a thesis statement.
The Ultimate Guide to the 5-Paragraph Essay
Below is a collection of strong and exceptionally strong response papers from students. All received high grades. They are good examples of insightful thinking and strong writing. Many of the best responses are later in the list. I continue to add to this collection as I find new examples of strong writing.
What Is a Literary Essay?
My PhD is in English with a focus on medieval literature. Besides teaching college literature courses, I write creatively, and my debut young adult novel comes out in September. As a high-school survivor of this form and now a teacher occasionally receiving it from students trying their best, I have to say I hate this abomination. I hate it so much, I decided to be naughty and condemn the five-paragraph essay in a five-paragraph essay. Here you go. Or not. From the dawn of time, or at least the dawn of the modern high school, the five-paragraph essay has been utilized in high school classrooms. Despite this long tradition, the five-paragraph essay is fatally flawed. First, the five-paragraph essay constricts an argument beyond usefulness or interest. In principle it reminds one of a three-partitioned dinner plate.
A literary analysis essay is an academic assignment that examines and evaluates a work of literature or a given aspect of a specific literary piece.
Skip to content. Skip to navigation. Each semester, you will probably be asked by at least one instructor to read a book or an article or watch a TV show or a film and to write a paper recording your response or reaction to the material. In these reports—often referred to as response or reaction papers—your instructor will most likely expect you to do two things: summarize the material and detail your reaction to it.
