Advantages of Personal Response

How do you know when you are being asked for a personal response? And what does it mean to respond personally? When asked for your reactions to a particular subject, or for what you think is most important or interesting or revealing in it, you are being asked to select your own starting point for discussion, for the initial impressions that you  will later analyze more sytematically. You will often discover in such reactions the germ  of an idea about the subject.

The biggest advantage of personal response topics is that they give you the freedom to explore where and hogi to engage your subject. Such topics often bring to the surface your emotional or intuitive reponse, allowing you to experiment with placing the subject in various contexts. You might, for example, offer your personal response to an article on the abuses of hazing in fraternity and sorority life in the context of your own experience. Or you might think about it in connection to some idea about in-groups and out-groups that you read about in a sociology course, or as it relates to what you read about cultural rituals in an anthropology course.

Another advantage of personal response questions is that they often allow you to get some distance on your first impressions, which can often be deceiving. If, as you reexamine your first reactions, you look for ways that they might not be accurate, you will often find places where you now disagree with yourself, in effect,
stimulating you to think in new ways about the subject. In such cases, the first reaction has helped to clear the way to a second, and better, response.
 

Problems with Personal Response

Personal response becomes a problem when it distracts you from analyzing the subject. In most cases, you will be misinterpreting the intent of a personal response topic if you

1. View it as an invitation either to assert your personal opinions unreflectingly, or

2. Substitute narratives of your own experience for careful consideration of the subject

Similarly, when you substitute personal narrative for analysis, your own experiences and prejudices tend to become an unquestioned standard of value. Your own disastrous experience with a health maintenance organization (HMO) may predispose you to dismiss a plan for nationalized health care, but your writing needs to examine in detail the holes in the plan, not evoke the three hours you lingered in some doctor's waiting room. It is, however, okay to integrate some personal experience into a topic, provided that you have also analyzed the subject past the anecdotal stage to the point where you have become aware of the argument that is exemplified by your narrative.

Strategies for Using Personal Responses Analytically

Strategy 1: Trace Your Responses Back to Their Causes

As the preceding discussion of problems with personal response topics suggests, you need to bring your reactions back to the subject so that you can identify and analyze exactly what in the reading has produced your reaction, how, and why. If you find an aspect of your subject irritating or interesting, disappointing or funny, you will be able to use rather than simply indulge such responses if you then examine a particular piece of evidence that has provoked them.

Let's say, for example, that you are assigned to respond to an article on ways of increasing the numbers of registered voters in urban precincts. You find the article irritating; your personal experience working with political campaigns has taught you that getting out the vote is not as easy as this writer makes it seem. From that starting point, you might analyze one (to you) overly enthusiastic passage, concentrating on how the writer has not only overestimated what campaign workers can actually do but also condescended to those who don't register-assuming, perhaps, that they are ignorant rather than indifferent or disillusioned.

Once you get down to analyzing evidence, you will often find that you no longer agree with your original response. The attack you planned on the article for its naivete might instead become an explanation for the differences between the article's and your point of view. Perhaps the writer's enthusiasm was not founded so much on an oversimplification of the problem of getting out the vote as on another way of viewing the situation. Having opened this possibility, you might discover that the writer has in mind a much more long-term effect, or that urban models differ significantly from the suburban ones of your experience. A common result of tracing your responses back to their causes is a revision of your responses-not surprisingly, since you will inevitably be shifting the focus from your reactions to the material itself.

Another example: say that you are assigned to respond to a play that you found funny, such as J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World. Your best strategy would be to locate one line that made you laugh-such as the playboy's declaration at the end of Act I that if he had known how popular with the women he would become by killing his father, he'd have done it long ago. You could then ask yourself where the humor lies in this remark, what it suggests (for example) about the attitudes of rural Irish culture toward fathers, and the significance of the fact that the playwright uses the line to end the act on a comic note.

Strategy 2: Assume That You May Have Missed the Point

It's difficult to see the logic of someone else's position if you are too preoccupied with your own. Similarly, it is hard to see the logic, or illogic, of your own position if you already assume it to be true. Because you have assumed that something is obviously true or false, you cease to think about it and quickly forget where your view came from in the first place.

Although an evaluative response (approve/disapprove) can sometimes spur analysis, it can also lead you to prejudge the case. If, however, you question the validity of your own point of view as a matter of course, you will sometimes recognize the possibility of an alternative point of view, as was the case in the voter registration example above. (See Figure 2.1.)

A More Analytical Evaluative Response: "The author of the article oversimplifies the problem by assuming the cause of low voter registration to be voters' ignorance rather than voters' indifference." Although still primarily an evaluative response, this observation is more analytical. It takes the writer's initial response ("irritating") to a specific cause.

A Non-Evaluative Analytical Response: "The author's emphasis on increased coverage of city politics in local/neighborhood forums such as the churches suggests that the author is interested in long-term effects of voter registration drives and not just in immediate increases." Rather than simply reacting ("irritating") or leaping to evaluation ("oversimplifies the problem"), the writer here formulates a possible explanation for the difference between her point of view on voter registration drives and the article's.

Strategy 3: Achieve Critical Detachment

Especially in cases where your primary response is emotional (anger, moral indignation, fear), you run the risk of getting so caught up in expressing how you feel
that you will not get around to examining the subject analytically. Paying too much attention to how a subject snakes you feel or fits your experience of life can seduce you away front paying attention to how the subject itself operates. This problem is compounded in areas where there are few or no arguments in favor of an opposing point of view. Except in very- limited cases, for example, you could not achieve critical detachment on the subject of racism by considering that it might be a good thing. In such cases, the aim of achieving critical detachment is not to get you to change your mind or even to assess the value of alternative points of view but rather to allow you to disengage your emotions enough for you to look closely at your subject and, in so doing, come to understand more about it.

In this context, consider how you might write about two vastly different treatments of racism, the charter of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) arid Black Boy, Richard Wright's autobiographical account of racist brutality during his boyhood in the American South. If the racism in both documents left you so morally outraged that all you did was list examples of it and voice your disapproval, you would be able to write virtually the wine personal response essay to both documents! In this respect, the documents themselves have become irrelevant.

How do you achieve critical detachment from your first responses in order to transform theta into analysis? In the case of the KKK charter arid Black Boy; for example, you could locate passages that provoked your reaction and carefully study their specific language. Question it. How do the passages you've selected reveal the writers' assumptions about the nature or causes of racism? Or you might focus on a part of the larger subject, such as the language of racism or the psychological effects of racism. What are the apparent intentions of the authors, and how does their use of language define or manipulate their intended audience?

Whatever questions you ask, so long as they focus on the material rather than just your reactions to it, they can provide a very useful way of redirecting you from the merely personal and toward some more public and generalizable understanding.

Strategy 4: Locate the Topic within a Limiting Context

Suppose you are asked to write about the topic "Define your religious beliefs." Although this question would naturally lead you to think about your own experiences and beliefs, you would probably do best to approach the question in some more limiting context. The reading in the course could provide this limit. Let's say that thus far you have read two modern religious thinkers, Martin Buber and Paul Tillich. Reflecting on these thinkers' ideas would not necessarily push you and your convictions out of your essay but could give you a means of bringing your own beliefs into clearer view. "What do I believe?" would become "How does my response to Buber and Tillich illuminate my own assumptions about the nature of religious faith?" An advantage of this move, beyond making your argument less general, is that it would help you to get perspective on your own position.

Another way of limiting your context is to consider how one author or recognizable point of view that you have encountered in the course might respond to a single statement from another author or point of view. If you used this strategy to respond to the topic "Does God exist?" you might arrive at a formulation such as "How would Martin Buber critique Paul Tillich's definition of God?" Although this topic appears to exclude personal response entirely, it in fact does not. Your opinion would necessarily enter because you would be actively formulating something that is not already evident in the reading (how Buber might respond to Tillich).