What is a Personal Response Essay?
Completion requirements
Note-taking
A personal response explores your own reactions to what you have read. A personal response can be written in several ways. You can choose to write an essay or a creative response. For your next assignment, you will be writing a personal response essay.
Previously, you wrote a creative personal response.
The personal response essay focuses on your feeling and viewpoints; therefore, your writing will be more personal. Feel free to use "I think", "I believe", and "in my opinion" in this type of essay. That being said, it should still be thoughtful and polished. The personal response should have a purpose (big idea) and use supporting details from the text(s) to develop it.
In this particular assignment, your purpose is to explore the big idea of one of the short stories you've read. When writing your response, consider both the message the author is conveying about the question and your emotional reaction. As you draft your opening paragraph for this upcoming assignment, you should be thinking about what aspects of the story have elicited this response. You can even do this about a work of literature that you dislike! Describe the elements that stand out for you such as themes, structure, language, or powerful sections.
In your personal response essay, you should also explore how the text connects to your personal experience. Have you had similar experiences to the characters? Can you relate to the conflicts they face? If you have not experienced something similar firsthand, can you think of someone who has? Maybe a friend or family member comes to mind. And if you still cannot think of a connection, widen your search so you consider other texts you have viewed or read. Does this text remind you of a novel you read or something you saw in the news? Depending on what the text and question are, it may be easy or hard to find a personal connection but keep digging because you will find one! You might not always connect to a text based on the experiences being described, but you should always be able to connect to the text's big idea, which is the author's purpose in writing the text.
In this particular assignment, your purpose is to explore the big idea of one of the short stories you've read. When writing your response, consider both the message the author is conveying about the question and your emotional reaction. As you draft your opening paragraph for this upcoming assignment, you should be thinking about what aspects of the story have elicited this response. You can even do this about a work of literature that you dislike! Describe the elements that stand out for you such as themes, structure, language, or powerful sections.
In your personal response essay, you should also explore how the text connects to your personal experience. Have you had similar experiences to the characters? Can you relate to the conflicts they face? If you have not experienced something similar firsthand, can you think of someone who has? Maybe a friend or family member comes to mind. And if you still cannot think of a connection, widen your search so you consider other texts you have viewed or read. Does this text remind you of a novel you read or something you saw in the news? Depending on what the text and question are, it may be easy or hard to find a personal connection but keep digging because you will find one! You might not always connect to a text based on the experiences being described, but you should always be able to connect to the text's big idea, which is the author's purpose in writing the text.