English 30-1 · Personal response
Assignment I: personal response
You are given a text and an idea drawn from it, and asked what you think — in any form you like. It is worth 20% of the diploma, and it is the one piece of writing on the exam where the material is entirely yours.
- 1. What the task actually asks
- 2. How it is scored
- 3. Choosing a form
- 4. Planning in ten minutes
- 5. Where responses lose marks
What the task actually asks
The idea: the text is a starting point, not the subject. You respond to the idea the prompt draws out of it.
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Worth | 20% of the diploma exam mark |
| Scoring categories | Ideas and Impressions (10%) and Presentation (10%) |
| Suggested length | 600–1200 words — a guideline, not a cap |
| Form | Any prose or poetic form you choose |
| Material | Your experience, observations, and other texts you know |
The prompt hands you a text and then asks something like: what does this suggest about the ways people respond to expectations? The right move is to decide what you think about that question, and to use the text as a way in rather than as the thing you write about.
Referring to the text without summarizing it
Too much: three paragraphs retelling what happened in the excerpt.
About right: a sentence or two placing your idea against the text — the speaker in the poem keeps returning to a house she says she has left, which is the same contradiction I recognized in… — and then your own material.
How it is scored
The idea: half the mark is for the thinking and half is for the writing. They are judged separately, so neither can carry the other.
| Category | Rewards |
|---|---|
| Ideas and Impressions | How thoughtfully you explore the idea, how your response connects to the text, and how well your material supports what you are saying |
| Presentation | Voice, the suitability of the form you chose, how the piece is put together, and control of language |
Two consequences follow. A beautifully written piece with nothing to say loses half its marks; a piece with a real insight, expressed in a shapeless way, loses the other half. And because Presentation rewards voice, a response that sounds like a person rather than an essay template has an advantage.
Choosing a form
The idea: pick the form that carries your idea best — and that you can actually control under time pressure.
| Form | Suits | Risk |
|---|---|---|
| Personal essay | An idea you want to examine from several angles | Drifting into a list of examples |
| Narrative | An idea best shown happening | Story with no reflection, so the idea never surfaces |
| Letter or monologue | An idea aimed at a particular listener | Losing the idea inside the voice |
| Poetry | A compressed, image-driven response | Too little development for the marks available |
Any of these can earn full marks. What cannot is a form chosen to avoid committing to an idea — markers can tell the difference between a narrative that embodies a thought and a narrative that is hiding from one.
Planning in ten minutes
The idea: idea first, then material, then form. Deciding the shape before you know what you are saying is how a response ends up organized and empty.
- Read the text and the prompt twice. Underline the idea the prompt names.
- Write your answer to it in one sentence. That sentence is your controlling idea, even if it never appears in the response.
- Find one or two pieces of material — an experience, an observation, a film, a novel — that genuinely complicate or support it.
- Choose the form that would let that material do its work.
- Sketch the shape: where you start, where the thinking turns, where you end. The turn matters most.
Worked plan
Prompt idea: the ways people hold on to things they have outgrown.
- My sentence: we keep things not because we want them but because throwing them out would mean admitting who we are now.
- Material: clearing out my grandmother's kitchen; the box of hockey gear I have not touched in three years.
- Form: personal essay — I want to move between the two and reflect, which a narrative would make awkward.
- Turn: realizing that the box is not about hockey but about the version of me who played.
Where responses lose marks
The idea: most weak responses are not badly written. They are unfocused, or they stopped short of saying anything.
- Summarizing the provided text instead of responding to the idea in it.
- Listing several experiences shallowly rather than developing one or two.
- Losing the thread: an opening about one idea, a middle about another.
- Ending by restating the prompt, which tells the reader you stopped rather than arrived.
- A form you cannot sustain — an ambitious structure that collapses in the second half.
- No voice: writing in a flattened, borrowed register because it seems safer.