EXAMPLE FORUM-STYLE READING RESPONSES
An essential part of this class is the Reading Response Forum. The idea is to create a response that not only responds specifically to your choice of topics posed by the instructor, but also responds to the ideas offered by your peers in their posts.
Below are some pointers for crafting an excellent response, along with some examples of past Dawson student responses that earned at least an 8.5 out of 10.
Think of your reading response as a 1-point essay, with a specific thesis paragraph and a following paragraph developing some examples to support your argument.
Do not try to take on too much. It is better to focus on one aspect (a scene, event, character, conflict, element of setting, symbol, etc.) than to try to canvas the entire story.
Make specific references to the text(s) in the form of quotations, descriptions, and references to key moments.
Cite all quotations and specific references to the texts in MLA style at the end of the sentence containing the reference, as in the following example:
​ The narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" repeatedly questions "for what had I to fear?"--a sign that his overconfidence on
having so perfectly handled the murder may be a mask for unconscious insecurity (Poe 320).
Make sure that your response addresses the ideas and concepts outlined in the topic at hand. That is, answer the question posed!
Hold a dialogue with your peers. Reference and respond to ideas and analyses in the responses made before yours.
Proofread carefully. Spelling and grammar are important, and this response will be seen (and responded to) by the entire class.
EXAMPLE RESPONSES
The following examples are student responses for a Fall 2018 Dawson course I taught entitled "Reading Alfred Hitchcock." Note that some of the responses below are well under the 350-words (+/-) required for this assignment. Because the platform doesn't allow for italics, students have indicated the titles of longer works in UPPERCASE.
Example 1 (320 words)
In this response, students were asked to compare Alfred Hitchcock's film Rope with Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart."
​In both Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" and Alfred Hitchcock's ROPE, murder victims (both men) haunt their murderers in a profound way, seemingly having more of an influence on their murderers than they ever could have when alive. Both stories also share the similarity of having the murderers themselves be the most compelling, developed characters in the respective works. In "The Tell-Tale Heart", the narrator kills an old man whom he claims to love, because he finds one of the old man's eyes disturbingly pale and accusatory. In ROPE, college roommates (and likely lovers) Phillip and Brandon kill David, one of their oldest friends because they deem him intellectually inferior to them, and thus not deserving of life. Both victims can be seen as representing different sides of society and its norms: the eye, representing the critical side of orderly society and the wisdom of age--always watching, striking fear into those who dare to defy it--and David, the reliable mutual friend who might have acted as the glue between everyone at the party, and who seems to have been emotionally more mature than his "intellectually superior" friends. Throughout ROPE, the guests grow more and more worried by David's absence, saying that he has never been late in his life. This stability and consistency in David is seen by the murderers, especially murder-mastermind Brandon, as a display of complacency and ordinariness that justifies his murder by "superior" humans. Brandon—and his partner Phillip to a lesser extent—shares many similarities with "The Tell-Tale Heart"'s murderous narrator, particularly his eventually self-destructive confidence. Throughout ROPE, Brandon shows very little desire to hide his crime and flaunts it at every occasion, from serving the meal on the chest in which David's body lies strangled, to tying up a bunch of books with the very rope he used to strangle his friend. Similarly, Poe's narrator leads a couple of suspicious police officers directly to the scene of his crime to revel in his accomplishment, seating them directly over the boards of the floor under which his victim is buried. In both cases, this performative overconfidence leads to a confession of the crime, suggesting that both murders held a paradoxical wish for their crime to be discovered.
I find Ameera's response to ROPE's victim David to be quite compelling and I'd like to push it even further. She mentions that David, "is nothing more than a placeholder" in the sense that the body is simply a representation of the murderers' "desire to wait" but I'd expand on that to say that idea of "David" is like a countdown. Each time his name is mentioned the guests get one step closer to uncovering the protagonists' truth, and the boys' philosophy professor Rupert is the last straw, the final tick of the clock, that then gives way to the alarm, or for a more concrete notion: the confession. Brandon has decided to hide the body in plain site and never really shied away from the topic of his friend's seemingly baffling tardiness to the party because he seems to desire being found out for his crime; he wants to be praised by his mentor Rupert for his actions. Brandon puts on a show to display how confident he is in his 'perfect murder'; much like the narrator in Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," who invites the officers into the very bedroom where he has dismembered and buried the corpse. The sound of the heartbeat in "The Tell-Tale Heart" is a clear representation of the clock as well, counting down the seconds until the truth comes out. The narrator repeatedly questions "for what had I to fear?" thus showing that he truly believes he's off the hook for his murder (like Brandon) but in the end, it is his own slip of the tongue that leads to his conviction (Poe 320). The incessant heartbeat heard by the narrator in the short story (possibly his own), and David's name in the film are both symbolic of a clock, the countdown to when the truth resurfaces; which finally condemns the protagonists in their murderous ways. This, in turn, shows that there is no such thing as a 'perfect murder' and that the characters' over-confidence was nothing but a demonstration of their desire to be discovered. The countdown leads to the termination of their "desire to wait," as Ameera had previously mentioned. But it also suggests something of human desire to be recognized for an accomplishment, even if the revelation of such an accomplishment would lead to one's undoing.
In this response, students were asked to compare Alfred Hitchcock's film Frenzy with Shirley Jackson's short story, "Jack the Ripper."
The fact that both Hitchcock's FRENZY and Jackson's "Jack the Ripper" use the city of London to frame their narratives provides insight on how people, or in this case characters, can be influenced by the apathy of an urban environment. Everything about big cities such as London—from their smoggy atmospheres to their vast populations or the constant rumble of industrial or capitalist 'progress'—creates claustrophobic conditions where horrors arise. Here, the confinement can be a metaphor for oppressive normalization. Indeed, in FRENZY, "the neck-tie murderer," who became famous for sexually assaulting women prior to strangling them, is not taken seriously by the public. Both the pervasive newspapers, who like to give nick-names to serial killers, and some of the city's elite who think mass murderers are "so good for the tourist trade" give viewers the impression that crimes are a business opportunity, rather than a real threat. Consequently, the murderer isn't only a symbolic figure associated with the oppression of industrialization, he is also normalized by the population as a kind of mascot, manifesting the city's desire for violence. In parallel, Shirley Jackson creates a version of 'Jack the Ripper' "that is now simply part of an aggregate ripper," borne of a similar urban desire for contact through violence. Although there is only one true criminal in her short-story, the bystanders who refuse to help a girl passed out in the street contribute to the decay of human morals to an equivalent degree to Hitchcock's film. Jackson and Hitchcock provide us with an interpretation of these characters as magnifying glasses for the oppressive climate of the urban setting, and how the urban environment desensitizes its citizens to look upon their fellow citizens in total apathy, as long as they are safe and centred.
In this response, students were asked to compare Alfred Hitchcock's film Frenzy with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper."
Women's resistance to patriarchy is evident yet subtle in FRENZY, and each female character has her own way of resisting. Because of the societal constructs in place favouring men's voices and interests, women are not able to openly express the oppression that they feel. They are sometimes incapable of realizing the oppression they are living themselves, because it is so ingrained in society. This is the main argument that Perkins-Gilman makes, and while the narrator of "The Yellow Wall Paper" internalizes her oppression, women in FRENZY have other ways of fighting back. Gilman's "Yellow Wallpaper" outs the tyrannical effects of social misogynist abuse on women. The female narrator is kept under lock-and-key and infantilized by her husband. She's patronized and forbidden from with writing and expressing any thought. That element of the story can be interpreted as the husband's fear towards his wife's independent thinking and intellectual abilities, expressed through prohibiting any actions which might encourage it. On a larger scale, he's (as were most men during that time due to the social contexts of the period) afraid of strong, thinking women. Gilman's narrator finds her escape from such restraints on her creativity in turning to full-scale insanity, a world she can control. Although succumbing to fatal fates, the women in Alfred Hitchcock's FRENZY resist male authority in similar ways. It is undeniable that aggression and harassment on women is omnipresent in the plot of FRENZY. Yet, I'd argue that the way it does so ultimately shines a negative light on and condemns such actions. The predator's (neck-tie murderer a.k.a. Bob Rusk) victims are all independent, strong and successful in their own way. They are women he feels pleasure in making vulnerable and annihilating. Perhaps the pleasure he gets from committing those crimes is the satisfaction of reasserting his "manliness" he feels jeopardized in their presence. The importance in the weapon of choice being a neck-tie is not to be overlooked. A tie, which is a quintessential symbol for 'masculinity' and male, happens to be what chokes the women to death. It's a possible allegory of sorts for the oppressive patriarchal society which figuratively suffocates women. The men are more comfortable when the women resist, as is shown when Rusk says, "I like you to struggle. A lot of women like to struggle." As a result, the women in both the story and the film continuously shift from monsters to victims. Whether they resist passively or creatively, these women create a sense of terror within their emasculated male oppressors.