By: Mikayla Hill
In the two stories, “The Hawk” by Doyle and “The Limits of Friendship” by Konnikova, reading and annotating them improved my ways of note taking and analyzing texts. The first story we read was “The Hawk”. In this story it had told a story about a homeless man who was an ex-football star in his past years and ended up living in a tent on the field he grew up playing on. He was also a very well-respected man in his community and people trust him including authorities and mothers with their children. When reading and annotating this text, I was still very new to annotating texts and when annotating I didn’t get a chance to investigate the story as much as needed. When investigating the author, it gave me lots of information on him and why he would write this story, making it more interesting for me to read. When highlighting and note taking in the text, I wasn’t sure what I needed from the text or what was important and found myself marking unnecessary things making it more difficult to look back on in the future.
When in class, I started to make more sense of my annotations and read many valuable tips on great note taking skills which benefited me on the text I read next which was “The Limits of Friendship” by Konnikova. This text was about how social media has a very negative impact on the friendships and connections we have today. When annotating and putting the pieces together for this text, I managed to improve my note taking skills by using letters like “U, Q, ER, RH” next to passages and sentences that I could look back on and distinguish easier than the random things I had annotated on the last story. I could use the U to show my understanding on something and the Q to go back if something was unclear to me. Looking into the author for this story was also very beneficial. Konnikova is a journalist and American writer, but she is also a television producer, podcaster, and poker player which gave me certainty that has had experience with relationships and people in her life, and I could tie that to why she wrote about relationships.
Although I have learned so many new methods with note taking there is still room for improvement on some factors. Some would include summarizing the text in more detail and identifying the keys points and theme of the text quicker. I often find myself rereading the text multiple times just to get a brief understanding and have trouble identifying themes and key points.
