19 Evaluating a Response
Learning Outcome
Evaluate your response for the purpose of revising and editing.
Self-assessment and Peer Feedback
After drafting your response, use the following checklist to read and evaluate it yourself, or ask a peer to use the checklist to review and evaluate your response. The assessment questions are based on the response-writing criteria presented in the previous chapters.
Questions 1-5 lead to a simple “yes” or “no” response. The answers to those questions should be “yes.” If the answer to any question is “no,” then you should revisit that aspect of your response.
Questions 6 and 7 are open-ended. If you are evaluating a peer’s response, be specific so that your feedback is useful to the writer. If you receive feedback that is too general (e.g. I thought some ideas were clear), then ask your peer for more specific guidance (e.g. Please tell me which ideas were clear and which were unclear.).
Additionally, reading other students’ responses is valuable because it will expose you to different points of view about the article. This will help you to rethink your ideas.
Self-assessment/Peer Review Questions
- Is the main point of the response stated in a topic sentence that is the first sentence of the paragraph?
- Does the paragraph contain enough support?
- Is the support focused and unified?
- Does the response provide the student’s opinions and/or connections related to the text or ideas in the text? (Make sure the student has not written another summary of the article or a detailed summary of some point in the article.)
- Is MLA formatting used correctly? Is the Work Cited included and correct? Are quotes and specific paraphrased information cited?
- What did the writer do well? (e.g. What is engaging? What is clear?)
- What is unclear or needs more explanation?
Looking Ahead to the Thematic Readings
Now that you have been introduced to the techniques of summary and response writing and started to practice them, you will have the opportunity to continue practicing with the readings included in the subsequent chapters.
Writing a summary and response once is not enough to become proficient at these types of writing. Practice is essential to becoming more comfortable, efficient, and confident with academic reading and writing.