Practice: Respond to a Source

Putting your response into words can help you sort out your reactions to the ideas, information, and arguments in a source. Use the following guidelines to write an informal response to Bill Doe and Spider Marks’ column or the State & Local Energy Report article:

  1. Identify a focus for your response. You might select important information, an intriguing idea, or the author’s overall argument.
  2. Decide what type of response you are going to write: agree/disagree, reflective, analytical, or some combination of the three types.
  3. Write an introduction that identifies the information, idea, argument, or source to which you are responding, lays out your overall response (your main point), and identifies the source’s author and title.
  4. Provide reasons to support your main point and evidence to support your reasons.
  5. Clearly credit the sources of any information, ideas, or arguments you use to support your response: use quotation marks for direct quotations, and identify the page or paragraph from which you’ve drawn a paraphrase or quotation. (See Chapter 19 for guidelines on documenting sources.)