Response Papers: Pump Out Filler Like It’s Your Job

After a long Monday night of raging at Z-Square, you stumble back to your dorm and realize you have a response paper due in a few hours. What to do? You have to do the reading and (gasp!) think about it to write a response paper, right? Think again, Poindexter: here are a few simple guidelines that will have you churning out response papers faster than the e-recruiting process turns out d-bags.

First, freestyle a general response to the reading. You had no response to the reading? No problem—it doesn’t have to be your response. Just think of a response that someone, anyone, could have conceivably had to what you were supposed to read. Here are a few examples:

“This changed the way I think about [title of the course] because…”

“I thought that the author didn’t effectively support [title of the reading] with the evidence on [random page]…”

“This echoes/refutes Professor [Your Professor’s Name]’s idea in [title of the last lecture]…”

As you can see, this form works for more or less any subject.

Now it’s time to move on to the explication (you will probably want to use the word “explication” in your paper). To start, put the texts in “dialogue” with one another. You only read one text? Put it into dialogue with previous readings, with the sole lecture you’ve been to, or with Karl Marx/Jacques Derrida/Ferdinand de Saussure (choose one). Hell, put it into dialogue with itself. The more ridiculous the comparison, the more explication you’ll need to justify it, and the closer you’ll be to your goal: 750 words, an e-mail to your TF with the file attached, and a big bottle of Olde English 800 that you can crunch while listening to “40 Oz to Freedom” on your iPod nano.

What does that malt liquor taste like, padawan? That’s right, it tastes like victory.