What is a Response Paper?

A response paper indicates your intellectual reaction to something you have read. It is not a summary. You need to demonstrate that you understand the text’s main claims, but you should do that very briefly, leaving most of the paper to deal with the following sorts of questions: What did you think of the reading(s)? What about them did you find most surprising, thought provoking, or ill conceived? Most important, why did you react in that way? You need to provide specific evidence from the text; examples of the particular attitude, perspective, claim, or assumption that grabbed your interest.

Even if you hate/love the work in question, your response paper should not be a “rant” (or a “hymn of praise”). You may want to begin by considering your “visceral” response to a book or article—how do you feel about it? Then you need to explain this feeling, both to yourself and to others. Assertions of the form “this book isn’t about medieval/gender/Latin-American history and so it is irrelevant to me” are not acceptable as a response. (The point of this course is for you to think "outside" your sub-field context.) However, it could be very useful if you could demonstrate:
a: how an author’s account of the “modern” world (for example) would be different if s/he knew more about the medieval era;
b: how the approach used by a historian of modern China (for instance) could be used in the colonial North-American context;
c: how a self-proclaimedly exciting new argument/method is, on your reading, "old wine in new bottles" ("the new boss, same as the old boss"; etc. etc.)

In some of your response papers, you may want to use one of the readings we have done to challenge another. In other papers, you may want to refer to works you have read in other contexts. Or, you may want to devote five-six pages to commenting on a single article or book. There is no set formula.

We will talk about this more one-on-one when I return your first paper to you. You should also feel free to ask me questions about this before you write your first paper. If you cannot attend my Thursday afternoon office hours, please make another appointment with me.

For further guidance, you may want to look at recommendations made by some other professors. I spent a fair bit of time looking around the web, and found the following guidelines particularly sympathetic:
History of Technology course (MIT, undergrad)