Reading responses should be about three pages in length, double spaced, 11 or 12 point font. No cover page is necessary, but be sure not to leave out your name and the date. It does not matter what citation style you use, but you should cite sources (including the week’s readings themselves and anything else you cite) fully and just as carefully as you would in a longer paper or something for publication.
We read the things we read in seminar for a number of reasons. Some of the main ones are: to acquaint you with the literature, to consider examples (positive and not-so-positive) of how others have contributed to a given line of inquiry, to get practice in assessing others’ work, and to identify opportunities for future contributions of original research. The point of the reading response is to engage intelligently with the readings with one or more of these purposes in mind and to make an argument about them.
The reading response should contain very little recapping or summarizing of the readings; just enough to make the argument that you want to make. The paper should certainly encompass at least two and ideally more of the week’s selections.
There are a variety of approaches that you can take to writing a reading response. It can appraise the readings, identifying their useful and/or flawed aspects. It can discuss the use of specific sources (e.g. their strengths, biases, limitations), concepts (e.g. how they are defined or operationalized), or methods. It can bring the current week’s readings into dialogue with issues from elsewhere in the course, or issues of general importance in the discipline. It can identify ways in which someone could build on what we’ve read in future scholarship.
Remember that reading responses must be turned in before class. Follow the instructions on the syllabus.
In courses that I took as a graduate student, I found that reading-response papers forced me to think about the readings more carefully than I otherwise might have. I think they also help add spark to class discussion, as students have already committed themselves to specific positions before class begins. Moreover, they give me, as the instructor, sustained contact with your way of thinking and expressing yourself, which I think is much better than just reading a single paper from you at the end of the semester.
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