The third learning outcome for this English 110 course says, “Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking.” In other words, annotating texts is important because it causes you to think more deeply about the text. Critical and active reading help in learning and thinking about the text and help to distinguish what is important. I feel that annotating the text made it easier to go back and find important pieces later when I was writing a paper. The color-coding helped me to find exactly what I needed, and the notes I made helped me to remember what each piece was about and why it was important. Throughout this semester, I feel that I have improved in my active reading skills. At the beginning of the semester, I tended to highlight in one color things that I thought were important, and I would rarely leave notes. The pictures above show an example of my annotations from the very beginning of the semester. But this isn’t the case anymore. Now, as I read through different texts, I have decided to start color-coding parts of the text. For the majority of the readings, as well as the section from Susan Gilroy, I color-coded using pink, blue, and purple. I underlined sections in pink if it was something I believed was important or something I had a personal connection to. I would use blue to underline evidence, and finally, I used purple if I was making a connection to another source from class. Next to each of these annotations, I left a note as to why that piece of text was important.
For example, in Susan Gilroy’s reading, I underlined several lines in pink that I thought were important. One of these was a section that was discussing specific pieces of text that are important to annotate and good things to make notes about. These included, “ideas that occur to you, notes about things that seem important to you, reminders of how issues in a text may connect with class discussion or course themes” (Gilroy). I then made a note next to the annotation about how not only was this important because it was a type of guide for annotating, but I also noted that I connected with this because I often annotate these types of things. Gilroy discussed why annotating is important, and her reasoning was that it creates a dialogue between the reader and the author. By reading what the author is saying and responding to it, it develops a conversation that connects the reader more deeply to the text. Although I’ve been annotating using this technique for the majority of the semester, the Gilroy reading helped to enforce the purpose of it. Looking back, annotating has helped me a lot this semester. It allowed me to go back to each of the texts as I started writing a new paper, and I would almost always find the information and evidence I needed to support my claims. Because of this, I believe I did a decent job of “interrogating” the text to pick out what was important.
