Personal Response Format Teaching you how to write

Personal Response Format Teaching you how to write a very good personal response paragraph!

Step #1 ¡ State the author’s opinion: l In the essay “Would You Donate Your Face for a Transplant? ”, by Joy Victory, the author states that “the face is arguably more personal than our kidneys and lungs”.

Step #2 ¡ State your position. Do you strongly agree/disagree? Do you agree with part of what he/she is saying? l I strongly agree with Victory’s statement as the face is the most personal part of our bodies.

Step #3 Explain your opinion with reference to personal experiences and observations (it is a personal response after all) ¡ You should give 2 or 3 examples to support your opinion and you must develop them with enough detail to EXPLAIN your position. ¡

Step #4 ¡ Summarize your idea or make a judgment about the issue to conclude.

Tips Stick to the quotation you are being asked to respond on. ¡ Avoid ranting and going off topic. ¡ Make an outline before you start writing. This will help you stay focused and maintain a rigid structure. ¡ Make it personal! ¡

What on earth does “quality of writing” mean? Organization: start with an outline ¡ Focus: complete one idea before going on to the next one ¡ Spelling: it’s bad if I notice. ¡ Grammar: sentence errors, punctuation and capitalization ¡

HELP! I forget what sentence errors are. You are in luck! Here is a mini grammar lesson. Yahoo!

Comma Splice (C. S. ) The grammar crime: comma splices join two complete sentences with a comma. ¡ Joey went to the grocery store, he needed to buy eggs for supper. ¡ l This sentence is incorrect because “Joey went to the grocery store” and “he needed to buy eggs for supper” are both complete sentences. A comma alone cannot join two sentences.

Comma Splice (CS) How do we rehabilitate comma splice outlaws? ¡ There are three main methods of fixing commas splices: ¡ l l l Change the comma to a period Change the comma to a semicolon* Add a conjunction

Run On Sentence (RO) ¡ Same thing as a comma splice, minus the comma. l Joey went to the grocery store, he needed to buy eggs for supper. These are harder to find in your work because the tell tale comma is absent. ¡ You fix them the same way you would a comma splice. ¡

Sentence Fragment (SF) A complete sentence has two parts: a subject (what the sentence is about) and a predicate (the action) ¡ They are easy to identify because they just don’t sound right. ¡

In-class evaluation Tomorrow! You will be writing a personal response for me tomorrow, so make sure you apply all these steps.