A brief situational statement:
As writers, it is just as important to learn how to evaluate our writing as it is how to write. One may even say that the ability to read writing is one integral half of the whole writing "thing." John Steinbeck noted:
Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn't exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
We will both take on the position of the single imagined reader, and respond with a text of our own that imagines very much an author that we can respond to. This exercise requires that you shift your attention from what the essay means and how it means to evaluating the effectiveness of the essay. You want to recognize the successes of its rhetoric and helpfully interrogate the areas where it might want to improve its strategies.
The steps of this exercise:
1. Summarize and Reconstruct the essay. This is an opportunity to remember that active reading is an effective way to understand a written document but also to retain information. If you are having trouble picturing still what this means, as an active reader of your selected essay, you jotted down your initial reactions to various aspects of the essay, underlined key passages or scripted some kind of marginalia. Now pay particular attention to passages that provoke or trouble you and to passages that seem central to the production of the essay's meaning.
2. Consider the strategies at play. Think critically about what it means to engage an audience with a text. Since you just examined how the essay performed this task, ask now how well it performed the task it set out for itself.
3. Write a letter to the essayist. As a way of generating that letter, think about features of the essay; its meaning, its rhetoric. Bring your concerns together in a letter, seeking not to praise the writer but offer your reading experience to the conversation being initiated by the essay.
Manuscript Notes:
Your Summary and Reconstruction should be thorough and encompass as many rhetorical strategies from the readings and the lectures as you can identify, and its length will reflect its content.
Your Letter to the Author should be two to three double-spaced pages long. A letter will not usually include either parenthetical documentation or a bibliography. Telling the author that you are writing to satisfy a class requirement will not do the trick.