You can find the guidelines to the Critical Response Progression on Canvas if you click on the “Assignments” module—all assignment guidelines are posted along with the dropboxes already. Here is a more elaborate review of those guidelines:
The first skill we’ll be practicing is critical response. In the critical response progression, you will write an essay driven by a claim engaging with a scholarly text to expand or challenge that text’s presumptions, or arrive at new understandings of the rhetorical elements used to make the argument in that text. Through close reading and analysis, you will identify significant elements of the text that merit academic exploration and interrogation, and you will build your own argument around what that exploration reveals.
There are a few ways to do this. Two largely successful ways might be to begin with a claim after reading the essay, which in our case is Vershawn Ashanti Young’s piece, and once you read the essay, formulate an argument that responds to a primary or secondary premise that he’s making or responds to a particular rhetorical element he’s using, such as linguistic style, organization, tone, place of publication, or audience. Your argument may also respond to those kinds of elements and consider how those elements are being used to make the argument. This could be part critical response and part rhetorical analysis as a result.
The other way might be to read the essay and extract parts of the essay that are essential to its central premise and that you feel are most interesting to you on a gut level, and make a hypothesis about the elements of those particular parts and their efficacy.
The critical response essay progression is designed to help you enter into the scholarly research endeavor. Regardless of your field, you will find yourself needing to engage with the literature of your discipline. And your starting point will frequently be a single text, which you should read generously, finding merits before faults, so that instead of attacking and tearing down another person’s ideas, which is often how we’re trained academically, you’re looking for places to build those ideas up or expand them outwards. You should feel as though you have a kind of authority to question what the author overlooked, or what the author might have intentionally left out for reasons of space constraints, or because it didn’t quite fit with the aim of that particular essay. You can also consider what the author did more effectively or less effectively, and what gets enacted through language or stylistic elements. Critically engaging with readings like this in University Writing will help train you to be able to critically engage with the literature in your chosen field.
For this essay, try to avoid making a claim that perfectly agrees with the text’s argument, or you’ll have difficulty coming up with your critical response; you’ll just end up repeating what the author is saying. You can think of the critical response as raising an interpretive problem with or within a scholarly text. You’re not looking for something to prove. Rather, you’re identifying and engaging with problematic, unresolved, or unusual claims or rhetorical elements in this text in order to determine its relationship with a larger body of knowledge, and also with your own specialized local knowledge.
As we work through the Critical Response Essay, I want us to keep in mind that expertise is a construct, and it’s a construct that is determined by people who have a long tradition of looking at specific areas of knowledge as being the expert areas of knowledge and sacrificing everything else as amateur or hobbyist practice. I want you to think that whatever knowledge you are bringing to the classroom is still specialized expert knowledge, and expertise itself is sort of a myth. There is no real thing as an expert. So think about the experiences you’ve had. Think about the things that you have learned along the way in your particular life and in your local context as you’re reading through Young’s piece for this essay, and as you put all these things together, feel free to use that anecdotal evidence and that local expertise to say, “You know, here’s the thing that is being done well, and here’s what’s being overlooked, and here’s how I think we could move this essay forward as I critically respond to this essay in terms of how it was crafted and what its aims originally were.”
