Personal Drama Response Paper

Length: 3 pages.

Reading and watching are very different experiences. You take in information differently when you're reading a play from when you see it performed. For this paper, you will give personal observations about your experience reading a story (a written play or book) and watching a performance based on it (a produced play or movie).

Essential Elements:

• basics: Be sure you're comparing the written and dramatized versions of the same story. It's okay if the play/movie cuts or expands upon the source material, but it should be based directly on it. Examples: book/movie, play/performance, screenplay/movie. Dr. Seuss is acceptable, as are The Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, Twilight, etc.

• content: Just your observations. How did you experience reading the story? How was the viewing experience different? What did you notice in one that you missed in the other? What changes did the director make in producing the play/movie? Why do you think those changes were made? What did the book do that the movie couldn't? What movie elements altered your experience of the original story?

Additional Information:

• This paper doesn't need a Works Cited page or parenthetical references. Just make sure to identify your sources clearly.

• There's really no wrong way to do this paper (though see below); you can't make a bad grade on it. Just remember that if you put a lot of thought into it, it could raise your final average.

• One caveat: It's tempting to compare a movie to the book it's based on, but such comparisons are artificial because of the inherent differences in the two media. The usual complaint is that the movie left out details from the book, but this is necessary to fit the scope of a novel into two or three hours. A movie that included every detail from a novel would be so long as to be commercially unviable. Additionally, some things that work in print don't work on the screen and vice versa. You must judge a book by book standards and a movie by movie standards. Don't compare the two directly; compare your experiences of the two.