summary response essay ideas

Introduction

Goals and Goal Setting

Goals Common to All RST Writers

Other Goals to Consider

Defining My Own Goals

Advice about Assignments

Getting Started: Listing Topics to Write about in the Tutorial

Narrative One: Personal Piece on a Significant Experience

Narrative Two: Academic Piece on a Significant Experience

Summary/Response One

Summary/Response Two

Tutorial Evaluation Postscript

On Using the Resources for Writers

Generating and Developing Ideas

Finding/Expressing Main Ideas

Showing v. Telling Sentences

Focusing Topic Sentences

Thesis Statements

Reading Strategies

Assessing Your Reading Strategies

Summarizing

Writing Effective Summary and Response Essays

Discourse Analysis Worksheet

Trade Magazines

Selecting Readings

A summary is a concise paraphrase of all the main ideas in an essay. It cites the author and the title (usually in the first sentence); it contains the essay's thesis and supporting ideas; it may use direct quotation of forceful or concise statements of the author's ideas; it will NOT usually cite the author's examples or supporting details unless they are central to the main idea. Most summaries present the major points in the order that the author made them and continually refer back to the article being summarized (i.e. "Damon argues that ..." or "Goodman also points out that ... "). The summary should take up no more than one-third the length of the work being summarized.

The Response:

A response is a critique or evaluation of the author's essay. Unlike the summary, it is composed of YOUR opinions in relation to the article being summarized. It examines ideas that you agree or disagree with and identifies the essay's strengths and weaknesses in reasoning and logic, in quality of supporting examples, and in organization and style. A good response is persuasive; therefore, it should cite facts, examples, and personal experience that either refutes or supports the article you're responding to, depending on your stance.

Two Typical Organizational Formats for Summary/Response Essays:

1. Present the summary in a block of paragraphs, followed by the response in a block:

Intro/thesis Summary (two to three paragraphs) Agreement (or disagreement) Disagreement (or agreement) Conclusion

Note: Some essays will incorporate both agreement and disagreement in a response, but this is not mandatory.

2. Introduce the essay with a short paragraph that includes your thesis. Then, each body paragraph summarizes one point and responds to it, and a conclusion wraps the essay up.

Intro/thesis Summary point one; agree/disagree Summary point two; agree/disagree Summary point three; agree/disagree Conclusion

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Summary/Response Essays: Overview

A summary/response essay may, at first, seem like a simplistic exercise for a college course. But the truth is that most academic writing requires us to successfully accomplish at least two tasks: summarizing what others have said and presenting what you have to say. Because of this, summarizing and responding are core skills that every writer should possess.

Being able to write an effective summary helps us make sense of what others have to say about a topic and how they choose to say it. As writers, we all need to make an effort to recognize, understand, and consider various perspectives about different issues. One way to do this is to accurately summarize what someone else has written, but accomplishing this requires us to first be active and engaged readers.

Along with the other methods covered in the Reading Critically chapter , writing a good summary requires taking good notes about the text. Your notes should include factual information from the text, but your notes might also capture your reactions to the text—these reactions can help you build a thoughtful and in-depth response.

Responding to a text is a crucial part of entering into an academic conversation. An effective summary proves you understand the text; your response allows you to draw on your own experiences and prior knowledge so that you can talk back to the text.

As you read, make notes, and summarize a text, you’ll undoubtedly have immediate reactions. Perhaps you agree with almost everything or find yourself frustrated by what the author writes. Taking those reactions and putting them into a piece of academic writing can be challenging because our personal reactions are based on our history, culture, opinions, and prior knowledge of the topic. However, an academic audience will expect you to have good reasons for the ways you have responded to a text, so it’s your responsibility to critically reflect on how you have reacted and why.

The ability to recognize and distinguish between types of ideas is key to successful critical reading.

Types of Ideas You Will Encounter When Reading a Text

  • Fact: an observable, verifiable idea or phenomenon
  • Opinion: a judgment based on fact
  • Belief: a conviction or judgment based on culture or values
  • Prejudice: an opinion (judgment) based on logical fallacies or on incorrect, insufficient information

After you have encountered these types of ideas when reading a text, your next job will be to consider how to respond to what you’ve read.

Four Ways to Respond to a Text

  • Reflection. Did the author teach you something new? Perhaps they made you look at something familiar in a different way.
  • Agreement. Did the author write a convincing argument? Were their claims solid, and supported by credible evidence?
  • Disagreement. Do you have personal experiences, opinions, or knowledge that lead you to different conclusions than the author? Do your opinions about the same facts differ?
  • Note Omissions. If you have experience with or prior knowledge on the topic, you may be able to identify important points that the author failed to include or fully address.

You might also analyze how the author has organized the text and what the author’s purposes might be, topics covered in the Reading Critically chapter .

Key Features

A brief summary of the text.

Include Publication Information. An effective summary includes the author’s name, the text’s title, the place of publication, and the date of publication—usually in the opening lines.

Identify Main Idea and Supporting Ideas. The main idea includes both the topic of the text and the author’s argument, claim, or perspective. Supporting ideas help the author demonstrate why their argument or claim is true. Supporting ideas may also help the audience understand the topic better, or they may be used to persuade the audience to agree with the author’s viewpoints.

Make Connections Between Ideas. Remember that a summary is not a bullet-point list of the ideas in a text. In order to give your audience a complete idea of what the author intended to say, you need to explain how ideas in the text are related to one another. Consider using transition phrases.

Be Objective and Accurate. Along with being concise, a summary should be a description of a text, not an evaluation. While you may have strong feelings about what the author wrote, your goal in a summary is to objectively capture what was written. Additionally, a summary needs to accurately represent the ideas, opinions, facts, and judgments presented in a text. Don’t misrepresent or manipulate the author’s words.

Do Not Include Quotes. Summaries are short. The purpose of a summary is for you to describe a text in your own words . For this reason, you should focus on paraphrasing rather than including direct quotes from the text in your summary.

Thoughtful and Respectful Response to the Text

Consider Your Reactions. Your response will be built on your reactions to the text, so you need to carefully consider what reactions you had and how you can capture those reactions in writing.

Organize Your Reactions. Dumping all of your reactions onto the page might be useful to just get your ideas out, but it won’t be useful for a reader. You need to organize your reactions. For example, you might develop sections that focus on where you agree with the author, where you disagree, how the author uses rhetoric, and so on.

Create a Conversation. Avoid the trap of writing a response that is too much about your ideas and not enough about the author’s ideas. Your response should remain engaged with the author’s ideas. Keep the conversation alive by making sure you regularly reference the author’s key points as you talk back to the text.

Be Respectful. We live in an age when it’s very easy to anonymously air our grievances online, and we’ve seen how Reddit boards, YouTube comments, and Twitter threads can quickly devolve into disrespectful, toxic spaces. In a summary/response essay, as in other academic writing, you are not required to agree with everything an author writes—but you should state your objections and reactions respectfully. Imagine the author is standing in front of you, and write your response as if you value and respect their ideas as much as you would like them to value and respect yours.

Distinguish Between an Author’s Ideas and Your Own

Signal Phrases. A summary/response essay, especially your response, will include a mix of an author’s ideas and your ideas. It’s important that you clearly distinguish which ideas in your essay are yours, which are the author’s, and even others’ ideas that the author might be citing. Signal phrases are how you accomplish this. Remember to use the author’s last name and an accurate verb.

Examples of Signal Phrases

Poor Signal Phrases: “They say…” “The article states…” “The author says…”

Effective Signal Phrases: “Smith argues…” “Baez believes…” “Henning references Chan Wong’s research about…”

Drafting Checklists

These questions should help guide you through the stages of drafting your summary/response essay.

  • Have you identified all the necessary publication information for the text that you will need for your summary?
  • Have you identified the text’s main ideas and supporting ideas?
  • What were your initial reactions to the text?
  • What new perspectives do you have on the topic covered in the text?
  • Do you ultimately agree or disagree with the author’s points? A little of both?
  • Has the author omitted any points or ideas they should have covered?
  • Has the author organized their text effectively for their purpose?
  • Have they used rhetoric effectively for their audience?
  • Have your reactions to the text changed since you first read it? Why or why not?

Writing and Revising

  • Does your summary clearly tell your reader the author’s name, the text’s title, the place of publication, and the publication data?
  • Has your summary effectively informed your reader about the text’s main ideas and supporting ideas? Have you made the connections between those ideas clear for your reader by using effective transition phrases?
  • Would your reader think your summary is objective and accurate?
  • You haven’t included any quotes in your summary, right?
  • Does your response present your reactions to the text in an organized way that will make sense to your reader?
  • Does your response create a conversation between you and the author by regularly referencing ideas from the text?
  • Would your reader think that your response is respectful of the author’s ideas, opinions, and beliefs?
  • Have you used signal phrases to help your reader recognize which ideas are the author’s and which ideas are yours?
  • Have you carefully proofread your essay to correct any grammar, mechanics, punctuation, and spelling errors?
  • Have you formatted your document appropriately and used citations when necessary?

Sources Used to Create this Chapter

Parts of this chapter were remixed from:

  • First-Year Composition by Leslie Davis and Kiley Miller, which was published under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

Starting the Journey: An Intro to College Writing Copyright © by Leonard Owens III; Tim Bishop; and Scott Ortolano is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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For college students, writing summaries may seem like just an overly simple and absurd exercise. Shouldn’t they have learned to do it at school already? Yet still, most professors will find students now knowing how to correctly comprise what they’ve read into a brief compilation of key ideas. And if they can’t write about what they’ve read correctly, how could they possibly write a proper response stating their ideas? So, let’s finally figure out once and for all how you should structure and write your summary response essays and save both your and your professors time correcting and rewriting those works.

Writing a Summary Response Essay – What to Include & How to Structure

So you need to write a response summary. The very first thing you will have to do is carefully read through the original text. You will need to note the key details provided in this work, as well as your own thoughts regarding what you’ve read. Sometimes you might indeed be given not a particularly interesting source, of course. But it doesn’t mean that it won’t evoke any thoughts or emotions in you. So, be cautious even when you feel bored – after all, that’s a feeling too.

As you went through the source and made notes, you will now have to make sure you collected all the needed information. What that might be? For starters, it’s the key details about the publication: its author, title, publication date and place, and the main idea (or purpose). You will also need to identify and put into your own words the author’s key argument / opinion /claim /perspective. Presenting supporting ideas here may be a good decision, as it will help both you and your reader connect the dots which led the author to draw the conclusion they did.

How to Write a Summary Response Essay

When you collect all of this, be sure to combine it into one logical narrative. You are not making a list or simple recollection of the mentioned facts. Your writing needs to flow like a river. That’s where a proper structure might help you out. This is how your summary response essay should be built:

  • Topic paragraph This is the very start of the essay which includes the information we talked about: author of the source, title, publication place, and date. You can also provide the reader with a little background/context for the future discussion here.
  • The Summary After setting the scene, you may continue writing and present the author’s perspectives and claims they made in their work. Don’t forget to give supportive ideas to your reader too, because only then you will be able to build a logical text. Write everything down in the order it was discussed in the original source and include its initial conclusion (don’t forget to write in your own words!). Note : You have to stay objective despite putting everything in your own words. Do not alter the facts or opinions given in the source and stay as accurate and close to the original as possible .
  • The Response After presenting the summary, which can take any amount of paragraphs you need, you should move on to giving your opinion/evaluation of the reading material. Talk about your perspective on the presented issue. You are free to critique or agree with the author, just be sure to give a clear argument on why you think that way.

Following this structure, it should be easy for you to build a coherent narrative and state everything you have to say. And yeah, don’t just repeat the source, retelling everything verbatim – that won’t do you any good. Quotes are also usually not needed – after all, it’s a response summary and not just an analysis.

Types of Ideas that Can be Presented in Your Summary Response Essay

In a summary response essay, you’ll come across various types of ideas, such as facts, opinions, beliefs, and prejudices. Each requires a different approach in your response. For instance, you might reflect on new knowledge gained, agree with well-supported arguments, disagree based on personal experiences, or note omissions/inconsistencies in the author’s discussion. Moreover, analyzing the author’s text organization and purpose can deepen your response. This variety of ideas and responses helps move your essay forward and explore the original text much deeper.

Check out Our Free Summarizer

Step-by-step process of writing a summary response essay.

With a clear understanding of the structure and the ideas that you should include in your essay, it shouldn’t be as hard for you to compile a proper response summary. However, organizing the writing process correctly can also help make the process much quicker. That’s why we decided to analyze the existing tips and create a guide that would make essay writing more simple and effective.

Identifying Main Idea

Before starting your writing, make sure you found what was the point of the piece you’ve read. Ask yourself: Have I identified the text’s main ideas and supporting ideas? And, what were my initial reactions to the text? This will allow you to create a topic sentence for the summary paragraph and a thesis statement for the response paragraph.

Laying Down Supporting Facts

During this step, you have to dedicate time to picking the ideas that may help your reader understand the author’s point of view. You can also pinpoint the facts that may support your own opinion. Here, it would be helpful to ask questions: what led the author to draw these conclusions? Do I agree or disagree with the author’s points? Is it a little of both?

Outlining the Author’s Purpose

The third step is to determine the author’s purpose for writing and assess whether it was achieved. Maybe you will notice inconsistencies or biases in the writer’s logic. Or maybe something in the writing wasn’t as clear as it should have been.

Bring Everything Together

Now, as you have created your outline (because that’s what you were initially doing in the first three steps) you can bring all the pieces of this puzzle together. Add detalization to the outline. Express your opinion about the author’s main idea.

Note : When drafting your work (and first, you will create a draft that will become an essay only after you review it), be sure to include signal phrases to distinguish between the author’s and your own ideas. These can be words as ‘ Chomsky argues’, ‘Smith’s research states’ .

Finally, proofread your essay for errors and format it appropriately, according to the requirements stated by the professor.

Writing Example

To give you a clearer idea of how the summary response essay may look like, analyze the example we give below:

In “Existential Psychotherapy,” Irvin D. Yalom explores the existential approach to psychotherapy, emphasizing the human condition’s inherent concerns, such as death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. Yalom argues that confronting these existential realities can lead to personal growth and a more authentic existence. He presents a therapeutic framework that prioritizes understanding the client’s experience and encourages self-reflection and acceptance of life’s uncertainties. Yalom’s insights into existential psychotherapy resonate with me, particularly his emphasis on the importance of confronting existential concerns. I agree with his assertion that acknowledging our mortality and the limitations of our freedom can lead to a deeper appreciation of life and a more genuine connection with others. However, I find his discussion on isolation to be slightly lacking in addressing the role of social support and community in mitigating feelings of loneliness. Additionally, while Yalom’s approach to meaninglessness is thought-provoking, I believe that exploring one’s values and engaging in purposeful activities can also play a significant role in finding meaning. Overall, “Existential Psychotherapy” provides valuable perspectives on the human condition and the therapeutic process, encouraging both therapists and clients to embrace life’s complexities.

Keep in mind that this is just an approximate example. It doesn’t have the level of detalization that can be presented in this type of essay, however, it follows the appropriate structure and includes both a summary of the original work and the response paragraph.

Long-Term Skill Development: Why Summary Response Essays are Good for You

Writing summary/response essays isn’t just a school exercise. It can come in handy when crafting research papers or even compiling business reports. The first thing that this type of writing teaches you is to present complex ideas in simple words and brief formulations. The response part pushes you to form and articulate your opinions, a very important skill in persuasive writing and argumentation. Plus, the whole process boosts your ability to engage with texts critically and allows you to sift through different viewpoints and present your ideas clearly. So, while it might seem like just another assignment now, knowing how to write summary response essays can set you up for success in various writing tasks down the line.

What is a summary response essay?

A summary response essay is a piece of writing that presents a summary of an author’s main ideas and then offers a personal response to those ideas. It combines elements of summary and analysis, allowing the writer to engage with the text and express their own perspectives.

What are the key components of a summary response essay?

The key components of a summary response essay include a clear summary of the text’s main points, a thesis statement that presents the writer’s response, supporting arguments that elaborate on the response, and evidence from the text to back up the writer’s views.

What are some tips for writing a strong summary response essay?

For a strong summary response essay, start by thoroughly understanding the text. Then, create a clear and concise summary, followed by a well-defined thesis statement. Provide detailed arguments to support your response, using evidence from the text. Finally, structure your essay so it is well-organized and flows smoothly from one point to the next.

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Lindsay Ann Learning English Teacher Blog

Best Summary and Response Essay Strategies for Student Writers

summary-and-response-essay

July 13, 2020 //  by  Lindsay Ann //   3 Comments

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Have you tried summary and response essays in your English language arts classroom? In this post, we’ll explore the benefits of summary and response, and I’ll offer questions you can use to help your students find just what they want to say in a They Say, I Say assignment.

It is my hope as an English teacher that my students will write with frequency and with voice . 

To this end, I frequently ask them to compose written responses to various texts we read in class, from short stories, to poems, to nonfiction articles.

Goals of a Summary and Response Essay

First, I want students to closely read the text . This means reading (and re-reading) for critical understanding of the text, making marginal notes, and marking important passages. As students closely read, they should be thinking about the author’s message, style, and impact on them as readers .

Although a summary-response paper may be intended to demonstrate that students have read the required text(s), I want more than simple reading comprehension . 

I want students to think critically.

Therefore, I teach students to read for comprehension  so that they can join the conversation started by the author. 

In this conversation, students must be prepared to respond and evaluate, adding unique thought and analysis prompted by the original text, extending the author’s thoughts with their own . This is what summary and response essay writing is all about.

To state it simply, I often use the analogy of a dinner table conversation. I tell students that reading a text is like pulling up a chair to the dinner table (the text is the main course). To join the dinner conversation, they must be unique, they must do more than summarize the original text, and they must spend time thinking .

Summary Writing Tips

Writing a summary is a lot like the “echo back” step in a good conversation. It’s a check for understanding. Before I move on to add my own thoughts into the conversation, I want to make sure that first I am hearing and understanding what the other person is saying. 

summary-and-response-essay

This is the “they say” part of response writing. 

➡️ It should be in students’ own words. It should be brief, yet long enough to fully represent the author’s main claim and key supporting points. 

❗️ Summary writing is one of the BEST ways for students to improve their reading comprehension, and with increasingly complex texts, students must learn to represent increasingly complex ideas and nuanced organizational structures used by an author to convey his or her ideas. 

The first step in writing a good summary is to mark the text. I model this for students, showing them how I recognize what a paragraph or section of the text or the text as a whole is about. I talk out loud, state what I wonder and what I notice. Then I ask students to join the conversation by doing the same. 

As I do this, I am emphasizing that this is a conversation students are preparing to join. We have to first understand the message that an author is saying.

  • So, what is this author trying to say? 
  • What points is the author making? 
  • What organizational choices does the author use to convey his or her ideas? 
  • What relationships are directly stated or implied between ideas? 
  • What is the larger context for this conversation? 
  • How does the author’s message fit into the context?
  • What bigger picture significance of this topic does the author discuss or imply?

All of this starts with the question of “what do you notice?”  

As students make observations, I help them start to weave together these observations so that they can notice patterns and the author’s overall claim or message.

And, with practice, students begin to do this on their own in a summary and response essay.

Best Ways to Respond to a Text

➡️ After students are able to fully understand and represent the author’s ideas and convey this in the “They Say” portion of their response, we add the “I Say” portion of the response. 

summary-and-response-essay

❗️ In the beginning of the year, we focus solely on the “They Say” in writing until students are demonstrating proficiency. As they do this, I frontload “I Say” skills through informal conversation and debates in the classroom. That way, when I ask students to formalize their thoughts in an “I Say” written response, they are ready. 

For the “I Say,” it’s important to recognize the connection between written opinion and voiced response. Some students need to talk through their opinions before fully developing them in writing. 

For students to be able to add their own ideas to the author’s ideas in a summary and response essay, they must first have something unique and important to say. 

➡️ A sign of undeveloped thinking in response is if a student simply regurgitates the author’s ideas without extending these ideas through new examples or divergent thinking. 

❗️ I want my students to say “yes, AND” or “yes, BUT” to the author. I want them to make their own opinions and examples heard as a part of the conversation as if they are sitting down to dinner with the author and discussing the focus topic in detail.

Questions for Response Writing

The following list will help students shape the thinking that they will produce in response to different texts.

➡️ For all of these suggestions, students should always connect back to the original text(s) with in-text citations, quotes and paraphrasing when appropriate ( but be careful not to over-quote or over-paraphrase – you want this paper to be based on the original text, but also a reflection of your own thinking ).

Ways to Say “Yes, And” or “Yes, But” in Response

Ask a Question:  

  • Pose a related question to the author and explain how the author might answer it
  • Generate a question that the text prompts of you and answer it
  • Generate a question that the text prompts of you, and use additional research to extend the author’s ideas

Use Comparison/Contrast:

  • Compare an author’s claim to the claim(s) made in a different text or by a different author
  • Show how an author’s perspective or claim is different from something else or someone else’s idea

Try Analysis:  

  • Explain an emotional response to the piece you had and analyze what made you have this reaction:  was it something about yourself, culture, or society?
  • Explain why you had a hard time connecting with a text or an author’s claim
  • If responding to an older text or a different cultural text, explain how the author’s claim might function or malfunction in today’s society or your culture
  • Explain how this text could be seen differently through another person’s or another theory’s perspective
  • Explain how a controversy or other historical situation may have given rise to the author’s essay
  • Expose how your own bias or assumptions may interfere with your reading experience

Say “Yes, And”:

  • Extend one of the author’s ideas into a broader context discussion.  In other words, what is this idea a part of?
  • Pose an observation or realization this text sparks in you
  • Pose an important word or concept and explain how the author might define it
  • Examine a similar or parallel issue that this text is related to

Use Argumentation For or Against an Idea Offered by the Author:

  • If you turned the subject of this text into a question on which people would vote, how would you vote – and why?
  • State one of the author’s claims and bring in additional outside reasons and evidence (personal or researched) for or against this claim
  • Explain your subtly different definition of a term or perspective of a claim, and why this difference, while subtle, is important
  • Expose an author’s assumption or bias and explain why this assumption or bias weakens or strengthens his/her idea

Use Argumentation For or Against the Way an Author Presents Ideas:

  • Evidence:   Do facts and examples fairly represent the available data on the topic?  Are the author’s facts and examples current, accurate?
  • Logic:   Has the author adhered to standards of logic?  Has the author avoided, for instance, fallacies such as personal attacks and faulty generalizations?
  • Development:   Does each part of the presentation seem well-developed, satisfying to you in the extent of its treatment?  Is each main point adequately illustrated and supported with evidence?
  • Fairness:   If the issue being discussed is controversial, has the author seriously considered and responded to his opponents’ viewpoints?
  • Definitions:   Have terms important to the discussion been clearly defined – and if not, has lack of definition confused matters?

Audience:   Is the essay appropriate for its audience – does it convince who it’s intended to convince?

Wrapping Up

Thanks for reading this post! Phew, it was a long one, but I hope that you found questions that will help your students be successful with summary and response essay assignments. Please leave a comment below to let me know what you thought and if I can help!

Hey, if you loved this post, I want to be sure you’ve had the chance to grab a  FREE copy of my guide to streamlined grading . I know how hard it is to do all the things as an English teacher, so I’m over the moon to be able to share with you some of my best strategies for reducing the grading overwhelm.

Click on the link above or the image below to get started!

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About Lindsay Ann

Lindsay has been teaching high school English in the burbs of Chicago for 19 years. She is passionate about helping English teachers find balance in their lives and teaching practice through practical feedback strategies and student-led learning strategies. She also geeks out about literary analysis, inquiry-based learning, and classroom technology integration. When Lindsay is not teaching, she enjoys playing with her two kids, running, and getting lost in a good book.

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23 Strategy: Writing a Summary Response

Strategy: writing a summary response.

summary response essay ideas

A summary response summarizes the main ideas of an author’s work and also responds to the author’s essay by critiquing or evaluating the ideas presented. Note that there is an appropriate time for opinion, evaluation, and summary; take a closer look at some of the best practices in structuring your summary response.

Topic Paragraph:

  • Somewhere near the beginning of your essay include the full name of the text and author that is being discussed. Situate the issue with any relevant context or background information that might be necessary.
  • Include necessary background or contextual information about the author . Consider profession, culture, education, and so forth. Additionally, describe the author’s perspective on the issues at hand and consider the “why.”
  • Craft your thesis statement. In it, sum up what the author claims and include your opinion regarding the argument or perspective.

Subsequent Paragraphs: The Summary

  • Lay out the author’s perspective(s). Present the facts of the author’s argument. *Note–Within the summary paragraph, this is not the time to include your own opinions.
  • Discuss the context of the issue and explain the author’s overall perspective.
  • Present the major points in the order that the author made them.
  • Be sure to include the author’s concluding point(s) and any actions or recommendations that are relevant to the text.

Subsequent Paragraphs: The Response

Following the summary, you have the opportunity to respond, evaluate, and critique.

  • Briefly recap the author’s main points and perspectives. Then, include your own perspective on the issues at hand and explain why that is.
  • Include specific supporting examples and textual references to support your perspectives.

Loyola University Chicago Writing Center. (2017). How To Write A Summary Response Essay. Retrieved June 24, 2019, from https://www.luc.edu/media/lucedu/writing/lucwcowls/How to Write a Summary Response Essay.pdf

The Writing Studio at Colorado State University. (2019). Writing Effective Summary and Response Essays. Retrieved June 24, 2019 from https://writing.colostate.edu/guides/teaching/rst/pop5i.cfm

Built In Practice: Summary and Response

Use strategies to pre-read and then actively read an essay from 88 Open Essays .

Critical Literacy III Copyright © 2021 by Lori-Beth Larsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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COMMENTS

  1. Writing Effective Summary and Response Essays

    It examines ideas that you agree or disagree with and identifies the essay's strengths and weaknesses in reasoning and logic, in quality of supporting examples, and in organization and style.

  2. LUC WRITING CENTER “HOW TO WRITE A SUMMARY RESPONSE ESSAY” A ...

    Response: After summarizing the author’s argument, it is time to respond to the author as if you were having a logical debate with them. could be phrased in a better way or proved more convincingly. Critiquing and correcting or supplementing other thinkers’ ideas in a construc.

  3. Summary/Response Essays: Overview – Starting the Journey: An ...

    Responding to a text is a crucial part of entering into an academic conversation. An effective summary proves you understand the text; your response allows you to draw on your own experiences and prior knowledge so that you can talk back to the text.

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    Get clear instructions with outlines and sample essay forms for writing a summary, analysis, and response essay.

  5. Summary-Response Writing Breakdown | Cambridge English

    Identify the author (s) and the piece of writing that is being addressed. Give a brief summary that highlights the key parts, tone, arguments, or attitude. This may or may not include direct quotations. Critically evaluate the piece of writing.

  6. How to Write a Summary Response Essay - AcademicHelp.net

    A summary response essay is a piece of writing that presents a summary of an author’s main ideas and then offers a personal response to those ideas. It combines elements of summary and analysis, allowing the writer to engage with the text and express their own perspectives.

  7. Writing Effective Summary and Response Essays - earlham.edu

    A response is a critique or evaluation of the author's essay. Unlike the summary, it is composed of YOUR opinions in relation to the article being summarized. It examines ideas that you agree or disagree with and identifies the essay's strengths and weaknesses in reasoning and logic, in quality of supporting examples, and in organization and style.

  8. Best Summary and Response Essay Strategies for Student ...

    Have you tried summary and response essays in your English language arts classroom? In this post, we’ll explore the benefits of summary and response, and I’ll offer questions you can use to help your students find just what they want to say in a They Say, I Say assignment.

  9. Writing A Summary/Response - Rivier University

    Response: After you summarize, it is your chance to respond to what you read, to offer an opinion. Here are some questions to ask yourself when generating ideas for a written response: . What did you think about the essay? How do you feel about what was said? What parts did you like or dislike?

  10. Strategy: Writing a Summary Response – Critical Literacy III

    Strategy: Writing a Summary Response. A summary response summarizes the main ideas of an author’s work and also responds to the author’s essay by critiquing or evaluating the ideas presented.