Best of Miami Portfolios 2001 - Units.muohio.edu

RESPONSE TO A TEXT
This essay should respond to a written text (short story, novel, poem, play, or essay) or a
cultural text (film, music, or visual art) produced by professionals, classmates, or yourself.
The response should interpret or evaluate all or part of a text. Possible approaches
include analyzing textual elements, explaining the text’s significance, comparing the text
to other texts, relating the text to personal experience and /or connecting it to larger
social or cultural contexts. Use support from the text to develop ideas and strengthen the
focus without overshadowing your own response or giving extensive summaries. If
secondary sources are used, they must be documented correctly. (If the print text is not
common, a copy of it should be included with your portfolio.) This response to a text
should have a title.
While the general category of “Response to a Text” might conjure the image of a
straightforward, AP-style essay that focuses on a key theme of a novel or poem, there are as many
ways to write textual responses as there are texts. Although all the essays included in this section
are fairly conventional, they demonstrate the range of possibilities within the traditional format.
The first two essays provide examples of the kind of close reading and critical thinking portfolio
readers look for. Jessica Keel’s “Religion: Myth and Mistake in Native Son” provides moments of
dazzling close reading of Wright’s novel, while demonstrating the connection between the novel’s
themes and Wright’s politics. Moving from a unique introduction, Jessica pays close attention to
both local and global context and organization—she pulls out enough significant details to support
her claims but doesn’t allow them to overwhelm her analysis, and she is constantly aware of the
overarching connection she makes between Wright’s politics and writing. Brian Klosterman’s
“Woman: Doll, Child, Slave” places Henrik Ibsen’s ADoll’s House in historical context—a crucial
move for a comprehensive understanding of the drama. In analyzing the dialogue of the play, Brian
creates a sense of dialogue between the character of Nora and the nineteenth-century society that
produced her.
Stephanie Wood’s “Softly Spoken Strength” is a sustained character analysis of Janie in
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Stephanie makes effective use of quotes to
illustrate her points, and demonstrates a clear sense of control in her writing. In “Discovering
Truth,” Reynold Toepfer surprises his readers by juxtaposing two vastly different texts in order to
argue for their similarity of theme. Most impressive about Reynold’s work is the way he zooms in
on a few key moments in Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex—
each complicated enough to sustain papers of their own—to support his argument.
Be sure to look at the Complete Portfolios for more examples of a response to a text.
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