Student outcome #3: (active reading) This learning outcome focuses on active reading and a range of informal writing activities that develop understanding and enable us to engage meaningfully with what we read. (Word count: 303)
Annotating has helped me a lot this year with understanding the texts that we read. My annotating style is honestly very informal and I don’t know if that’s necessarily good or bad but it has worked for me this far.
Example of a causal annotation from “The Other Problematic Outbreak”
This picture is me kind of emphasizing a quote that I highlighted and although it doesn’t look like much of an annotation it actually was one of the quotes that I had picked out when I was organizing quotes for my essay.
I know that this isn’t the most effective way to annotate a piece of writing and that sometimes it does have to be taken a little more seriously. In class when we would make group annotations it would help me to add a little more depth to my own annotations and kind of break down the reading so I could better understand it.
Example of stronger annotation on “Walking While Black”
This annotation probably still isn’t the best but it at least has a little bit more detail than the first picture I had. Breaking us up into groups and assigning us things to look for in the text was something that I found helpful because if I didn’t quite understand something at first, once we went over it I usually did.
Being honest, I would not say that my annotation abilities have improved rather than simply changed. I have always been able to run a highlighter over a page and right down little notes but now after taking this course I have been introduced to the specifics of things I can look for that will actually help me with my work. These specifics include making marks where you understand, question, want to explore or extend, challenge and see rhetorical writing.
