Response Essay Examples & Free Samples With Analysis

Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” first published in 1948, ends with a village stoning one of its own members. What unsettled me was not the violence but the ordinariness Jackson gives it. The story convinced me that habit, rather than cruelty, is what keeps the ritual running.

Jackson spends most of her pages on small domestic business. Children stack stones during their summer holiday, the men trade talk of tractors and taxes, and the women arrive late because they were finishing the dishes. Nobody in the village explains what the lottery is for, and the one man who remembers the older rules only complains that the ceremony has grown careless.

By the time the black box comes out, the reader knows the schedule of the event in detail and almost nothing about its purpose. That imbalance is the story’s strongest effect. It puts the reader in the villagers’ position: familiar with the procedure, incurious about the reason for it.

Tessie Hutchinson’s protest that “It isn’t fair, it isn’t right” (Jackson 302) arrives too late to carry any weight, and it is plainly about her own bad luck rather than the practice itself. Her neighbors do not argue with her. They pick up the stones they have been holding all morning.

One part of the story convinced me less. Jackson gives the villagers so little inner life that they work better as a warning than as a portrait of a real town, and a reader who wants to understand how ordinary people agree to cruelty is shown that it happens rather than how it happens inside a person.

Still, the story does what a fable is meant to do. It sent me back to the customs I keep without asking where they came from, and that is an uncomfortable thing for a reader to be left holding.

In “Let the Language Requirement Go,” a column published in our campus paper last spring, Dana Whitfield argues that universities should drop the two-semester foreign language requirement. Her reason is that most students forget the language within a year and reach for a translation app anyway. She is right about the forgetting. She is wrong about what follows from it.

Whitfield’s strongest point is a practical one, and it deserves a straight answer. Two semesters rarely produce a speaker. I finished the Spanish sequence with a B and could not have ordered a meal in Madrid six months later, and most of my classmates would say the same. A requirement that produces this result is not doing what the course catalog claims it does.

The argument breaks down where Whitfield treats translation software as a replacement. An app moves words between languages. It does not teach a student what it is like to be the slowest person in a conversation, to guess a meaning from context, or to notice that another language divides up the world differently. Those are the parts of language study that carry over into everything else a student reads.

Whitfield also leaves out the students the requirement serves best. A student who arrives with a second language can already test out of it. A student who arrives with none may never take a language again if the requirement disappears, and that student is exactly the one it was written for.

There is a fair conclusion inside Whitfield’s evidence, but it is not the one she draws. If two semesters are too few to matter, the honest fix is a longer requirement, not no requirement at all.

Free Solo (2018) follows Alex Honnold as he prepares to climb El Capitan without a rope, which he did in June 2017 in just under four hours. The film records the climb, but its most affecting material is the crew filming it. By the end I had come to see the documentary less as a film about risk and more as a film about the people who have to watch someone take it.

The directors, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, keep returning to two kinds of shot. The first pulls the camera far back until Honnold is a pale speck on a wall of gray granite, with hundreds of meters of blank rock above and below him. The second sits close enough to show his fingertips on a hold. Cutting between them turns the scale of the wall into an argument instead of a caption.

The hardest scene to watch has no climbing in it at all. One of the camera operators, a climber himself, turns his face away from his viewfinder because he cannot bear to keep the shot. Another says out loud that he does not want to be pointing a lens at his friend when it happens. The film lets these moments run without a voice-over explaining them, and they carry more weight than any statement about danger could.

I was less persuaded by the film’s treatment of Honnold’s relationship with Sanni McCandless. It raises a serious question about what he owes the people who love him, and then leaves that question roughly where it found it.

One image stayed with me afterward: a single figure halfway up a blank wall, moving very slowly, with the whole valley in the frame behind him. The film never has to say what the risk means. It shows you the size of it.

Ferrante and Oduya (2021) report that first-year writing students who received structured peer feedback revised their drafts more deeply than students who received open-ended comments. The finding is convincing. The explanation the authors attach to it is too narrow.

The study followed 412 students across 18 sections of a required first-year writing course. Half the sections used a feedback form with four prompts. The other half asked reviewers to comment freely. Of the students in the structured group, 68% made global revisions (changes to the thesis, the organization, or the use of evidence) compared with 39% in the open-ended group (Ferrante & Oduya, 2021). The remaining students in each group edited only at the sentence level.

Ferrante and Oduya read this gap as evidence that a form lowers the cognitive load on the reviewer. That may be part of the reason. A simpler explanation is that the form tells the reviewer what counts as a comment worth making, and a reviewer who has been asked about the thesis will mention the thesis whether or not the work of reviewing feels easier.

The study’s own data supports this reading. Reviewers in the structured group wrote longer comments and referred to the assignment sheet more often, which suggests that they had a clearer sense of the task rather than a lighter one.

Two limitations deserve more space than the article gives them. All 18 sections came from a single institution, so the result may reflect the culture of one writing program. Revision depth was also coded by the researchers themselves, and the article does not report a second coder or any measure of agreement between coders. Neither problem undoes the finding, but both belong in the discussion rather than in a single sentence near the end.

Dr. Amara Reyes, a city planner, gave a guest lecture to our environmental policy class titled “Where the Heat Sits.” Her case was that summer heat is not spread evenly across a city and that the difference tracks tree cover and pavement rather than income alone. She made the first half of that case well. The second half needed numbers she did not bring.

Reyes built the talk on three claims. First, two neighborhoods two miles apart can differ by several degrees Fahrenheit on the same afternoon. Second, cooling centers answer the symptom and not the cause, because a resident has to leave home to use one. Third, the fix is a planting and paving program funded as infrastructure rather than as a summer emergency.

The first two claims were hard to argue with. She described walking the same route through both neighborhoods with a handheld sensor, and she was careful to say which parts of the difference her measurements could and could not explain. Her account of cooling centers came from interviews with residents who had never used one, which is more persuasive than an occupancy figure would have been.

The third claim was the weakest. Reyes did not say what a planting program costs, how many years a young tree needs before it shades a street, or who maintains it once the grant ends. A policy proposal without those numbers is a preference rather than a plan.

Her delivery helped her more than a slide deck would have. She spoke for the first ten minutes without slides, in a low and unhurried voice, and she stopped before each temperature figure so that the number landed on its own. She repeated one sentence three times over the hour: heat is a design outcome. By the end I could have recited it, which I suspect was the point.