Grade 11 Reading Response Topics**
At the top of each page, write “Reading Response #?,” your name, the title and author, page you are on at time of entry. Choose from the options listed below and fill one entire page with writing. This is credit/no credit so if you write for less than a full page then I won’t be able to give you any credit at all. This is about connecting with your book and about working out ideas. You may choose a different entry each time, but you don’t have to. You must complete three entries per book.
· Fully examine and explain a particular piece of the writer’s craft; you may want to consider any one of the following and explain how it underscores one of the motifs or themes of the book: metaphor, foreshadowing, symbolism, characterization, structure, hyperbole, imagery, diction, voice, etc.
· Describe and explain a personal reaction to a character, place or event in the text.
· Write a fictional letter to one or more of the characters or create a letter written from one character in the novel to another that expresses some unspoken feelings or thoughts.
· React, respond and explicate a “five star quote” of your choice. A “five star quote” is a quote that jumps off the page at you for any number of reasons. It may be aphoristic, profound, humorous, universal, or any reason you choose. For clarity, you must include the quote somewhere in the entry.
· Create an original piece of writing that is inspired by the novel; it may be a poem, some added dialogue, an advertisement, or a letter to the editor written in the voice of a character, for example.
· Choose a pivotal point in the novel’s plot and rewrite the outcome of a particular event as well as the characters’ motivations, actions and reactions. It is important to focus on one small section; keep it focused and detailed. (As an addendum, you may want to provide an explanation of how it would affect the novel’s direction and/or outcome.)
· Create an open-ended question that the novel has raised for you and then try to answer that question in your journal entry.
· Create a correspondence between one of the characters in this novel and a character from another piece of literature you have read.
· Think of a piece of music that is fitting for one of your characters. Fully explain what you chose and why.
· Create a “conversation across time” by having one of the characters in the text dialogue with a fictional or nonfiction persona from another time period/century.
· Create a short list of enduring understandings that emerge as you read. Use evidence from the book to support your claims about he enduring understandings you take away from the book. How will these understandings shape decisions you will make in the future? How should these understandings shape our society?
· Create a new kind of journal entry, write a description of it, then complete the entry.
**This reading strategy is inspired by the work of Louise Rosenblatt (1978), who explained reading as a transactional process that occurs between the text and the reader. Rather than assume that meaning is fixed and located within the text, Rosenblatt, a pioneer of reader response criticism, argued that meaning is the result of the transaction that occurs between the reader and the text.