Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking.

These annotated pages and the associated informal reading response are based on Robin Marantz Henig’s What Is It About 20-Somethings?.

The most obvious part of my annotation process is my highlighting. There are two main colors of highlights in this annotation. The green highlights are parts of the text that I think are important. This helps me go back and quickly see what I thought was important. This is useful when writing about the text. The orange highlights are perhaps even more useful when writing. They are passages that can be used as possible quotes. When both colors are used, it signifies ideas or passages that are of extreme important to the text. As mentioned before, these highlights are useful when writing about the text. This is evident in my informal reading response. Many, if not all of the points I addressed in the reading response were highlighted in the text. The reading responses are also useful in understanding this text because it acts as a way to summarize the text. This helps acknowledge the important aspects of the text.

Gilroy’s ideas coincide directly with the moves I have been making when annotations for class, especially the notes made in the margins. Gilroy writes, “Take the information apart, look at its parts, and then try to put it back together again in language that is meaningful to you.” For example, many of the notes I make in the margins are notes based on ideas or parts of the text which is important to me. Many of the notes I take also attempt to relate other texts read inside or outside of class. I use my notes in the margin to emphasis the parts I highlighted and elaborate upon them. It is often the case that simply highlighting the text does not connect myself to the text as deep as I need in order to write upon it properly. The notes made in the margins are also useful for connecting the text to other texts, questioning the text, understanding the text, and commenting on the text. Many of these moves I made in this example. My notes consisted mostly of notes that questioned the text, connected it to other texts, or were used to understand it.

One idea that I did not think of when making my annotations is the idea that it puts us in a conversation with myself. The more I look back at my annotations the more I see how relevant this is.