Personal Response to Literature

What is a Personal Literary Response?

Earlier in the course, you have created personal responses in the forms of a diary entry and a personal visual reflection. Now you are going to build on those learned skills further as you learn how to create a personal response to literature.

How is a literary personal response different from a personal response?
In all personal responses, you absorb the content and try to make sense of it in your own mind. You form understandings of and connections to the text. You think about the text and reflect on your own thoughts and feelings about the content of the text. A personal literary response requires these same  techniques. However, the difference is that in a literary response,  you must also support your thoughts and ideas with direct supporting evidence from the text. In other words, if you express an idea or a feeling about a text, you must then be able to provide proof from the text that will prove your ideas to be reasonable based upon what you have read.

For your next assignment, you will create a written personal literary response to a given short story. This will be written in the style of a personal response, where you will follow the "What? So What? Now What?" writing guidelines. You will have a planning chart to guide your writing, and this chart will help you to plan the three paragraphs that you will write.