Personal Responses to Reading

A personal response generally involves several details that analyze, interpret and make connections to the text that was read.

An effective response is elaborated and well-supported with direct evidence from the text.   It focuses on a given text and the reader’s interpretation of it, but it may also include strategies a reader uses to comprehend and interpret the text.  Some types of responses include:

• Connections to personal experiences, other texts, other media, other information sources
• Interpretation of characters, events or actions
• Description of themes or messages
• Critical analysis of author bias or point of view
• Analysis of the writer’s craft, techniques or literary devices and their effectiveness
• Application of what was read to another situation or the larger world
• Discussion of reader’s  craft (strategy application, inferences, predictions, synthesis)

For many students, prompts or sentence stems will help guide their responses and offer different ways to think about the text.  Some ways to use the prompts on the right include:

• teaching each prompt separately, using a shared writing approach.
• offering a set of prompts from which students may choose.
• writing each prompt on a separate strip of paper and having students draw them randomly.