In her article, “Craving the Other,” Soleil Ho asks the rhetorical question, “If a dish hasn’t been eaten or reimagined by a white person, does it really exist?” (This is the final sentence of the pa

Reading Response Guidelines and Rubric

READING RESPONSE ASSIGNMENTS

GUIDELINES & SCORING RUBRIC

Each of the seven Reading Response assignments will pose a question or ask you to respond to a prompt dealing with one or more of the assigned readings for the week. Six are required assignments; the seventh is available for extra credit or as a makeup for a response that you were unable to submit on time.

The goals of these short assignments are to get you thinking and writing about the topics we are investigating on a regular basis, to improve your critical thinking and analytical reading skills, to help you put the concepts we discuss in class to use in your writing, and to build good composition and argument skills. Your personal opinions are often important in these journal writings, but those opinions should be informed by the kind of close reading and analytical skills we will be practicing throughout the semester, and solidly backed up with ample evidence from the texts.

You will notice that the scoring rubric emphasizes original thinking, critical reading, and good organization skills. Although you should strive to write with correct sentence structure, grammar, and punctuation—and proofread your response at least once before clicking submit—I will be more concerned about failures of thinking than failures of grammar or mechanics in these responses. This emphasis represents a major difference from your formal essay assignments, which I will expect to be more polished.

Your responses should contain at least 3 paragraphs and 250-350 words (more is okay). Each assignment is posted to the appropriate module in Canvas, where you will submit responses as a file upload. These assignments are always due on Tuesdays before class, and prompts will be available on the preceding Wednesday, so you will have almost a week to complete each response. Late assignments will not be accepted for these, and the Canvas submission portal will close a few minutes after class starts. We will discuss the readings in class the day that the responses are due, which would give an unfair advantage in composing responses after the due time. If you must miss an assignment, you may use the optional Response #7 as a make-up.

I will use the rubric below to assign a grade of 0–30 points for each of the individual assignments. You must meet both quantity and quality requirements to receive a particular numeric score. In other words, you cannot get a 30 no matter how brilliant your writing is, if it is only 300 words long; similarly, you cannot get a 30 no matter how long your writing is, if it does not show an excellent understanding of the text and topic in question and respond to the prompt with thoughtfulness and accuracy.

READING RESPONSE JOURNAL SCORING RUBRIC

Grade	Quantity	Quality
27-30 (A)	315+ words	Original writing that responds to the question or prompt thoughtfully, demonstrates careful reading and an excellent understanding of the text in question, makes a clear, thoughtful, and accurate point using several details from the text as well as original thinking. The response is easy to follow with a reasonably logical structure and organization. It may contain some non-serious unintentional errors of standard American English conventions that would benefit from editing but do not seriously interfere with clarity or readability.
24-26 (B)	280–314 words	Original writing that responds to the question or prompt reasonably thoughtfully, shows a good understanding of the text in question, makes a clear and accurate point using details from the text and original ideas. The response is relatively easy to follow with minor organizational issues, but little serious confusion and no more than occasional missing or unclear transitions. It may contain a few unintentional errors of sentence structure, grammar or mechanics that would benefit from editing but do not seriously interfere with clarity or readability.
21-23 (C)	245–279 words	Original writing that responds to the question or prompt somewhat thoughtfully, shows a fair understanding of the text in question, attempts to make a point, but is somewhat disorganized or unclear, or remains vague due to insufficient details from the text. The response may not be well organized, or may have poor transitions. It contains more than a few unintentional errors of sentence structure, grammar or mechanics that interfere with clarity and readability, or suggest a poor grasp of some important standard American English conventions.
18-20 (D)	210–244 words	Original writing that barely responds to the question or prompt, shows little thought or understanding of the text in question, or fails to make a good point about the subject matter. This response is quite confused and vague, lacks details, or is riddled with serious unintentional errors of sentence structure, grammar or mechanics that detract from coherence and meaning.
10-17 (F)	90–209 words	Original writing that doesn't respond to the question or prompt, shows little or no thought, includes few or no details, is seriously disorganized and confusing, or is so filled with errors of sentence structure, grammar or mechanics as to make it nearly impossible to understand any point being made.
	<90 words	Or is not original writing.

All submissions must be in standard MLA format for academic essays, with an academic header with your name, date, and course information, one-inch margins and double-spaced text. Single-spaced documents do not provide me with enough room to make comments and annotations in Speed Grader, so I will insist on double spacing throughout all of your submitted work. Additional information on MLA formatting can be found at this Purdue OWL webpage (Links to an external site.).

LINK:

https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/craving-the-other-0