Response is the process of testing your ideas and expression for effectiveness. Reading your paper aloud to a sensitive, engaged audience, and being genuinely open to what s/he might have to say about it, transforms writing from a solitary act to a communal one.
Do you remember the scene from The World According to Garp where Garp shows his first short story to his girlfriend? (You probably don’t, since both the book and the movie came out long before you were born). As she reads, she dissolves, sobbing, saying that it is the saddest thing she has ever read. He dances in front of her, exulting. Her response to the story is the only way for him to know whether it works, whether it’s good.
We need that kind of information from each other. Good writers give it and get it routinely. Great writers depend on editors. It’s not a matter of one’s responder being a better or worse writer, though excellent writers are often very useful responders, since they’ve honed their sensitivity to words. The question is, does my writing do what I want it to do? How can I make it more effective?
By now, going into the conference, you have some ideas about the weaker and stronger parts of your paper. Ask your responder to pay special attention to those parts. The more specific you are about the kind of help you need, the more useful your responder can be.
Getting response takes great humility. It’s hard to receive criticism about our own expression, to look at our own writing as objectively as we need to do. But until we have that critical distance, until we can clearly see what would make our paper even more effective for our audience, we are not ready to REVISE.