I chose to write my reader response paper on William Carlos William’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” because I’ve heard so many interpretations of that poem and I wanted to write about how subjective that poem can be to the person reading it.
My outline included “This is Just to Say” as well as “The Red Wheelbarrow”, but I cut that section out because I figured it would be too long of a paper to focus on more than one poem.
I visited Dr. Pennington during his office hours to show him my working draft, and he said that my thesis and topic sentences were good to go! He also gave me the idea of collecting different interpretations of the poem in order to implement as evidence in my essay.
I wrote down my own interpretation of the poem, and then sent an email out to five of my close friends, asking them to read Williams’ poem and then send me their own analysis of it.
The response was great! I received multiple different interpretations and incorporated them into my paper as examples of how important reader response is to the meaning of a poem, and then I finished up the rest of the paper and submitted it for peer review.
My peer review went well, I was just reminded to make sure that I clarify myself in the claim that “No interpretation of a poem is better than another”. So I cleared that up in some of my topic sentences, and I was ready to submit the paper to my process portfolio.
