Throughout the semester, I have typically stuck with the same reading strategy that has proven useful to myself every time. I typically read the page normally, making small mental notes to sections I believe are important. When I see a section of text that I identify as very important, I highlight it and make an annotation in the margins. For texts that I may have trouble initially understanding, I simply reread it and even reread a previous page that may provide more context for the body of text I am having trouble interpreting. Once I figure out the meaning, I continue to move on with the rest of the text. The annotations I often make the most are “understanding” and “relating”. The understanding annotations help me note important areas of text that I know will be useful for my paper, and the relating annotations help me make connections such as “text to text”, “text to self”, and “text to world”.
Through revisiting my annotations, I admit that I can use work on the variety of annotations I am using. Although my methods have seemed to be working so far this semester, using a larger variety of annotations can help me further my understanding of the text I am reading immensely. One text I examined was “Learning to Read Biology: One Student’s Rhetorical Development in College” written by Christina Haas. This was the largest reading I had done in years, and was quite challenging. The content of the text was quite confusing to me initially, but I was able to understand Haas’ theories after patiently reading numerous pages multiple times and making effective annotations. This led to one of my best papers I had written all semester, and helped me gain confidence in my active reading abilities. Another piece of work I read for this paper was “Organization of a Research Paper: The IMRAD Format” written by P.K.R. Nair and V.D. Nair. I found this to be much easier than the Haas reading, and made numerous annotations and marks on each page. Using my active reading methods, I was effectively able to absorb all the information from these two literary works as I needed, and wrote good paper based off of this information.
Unfortunately, you are unable to see my highlighted marks, but here are some annotations I made in both readings.
Haas Readings:
Nair and Nair Readings:
Links to blog posts about Significant Writing Project readings:
