Annotating
The first week of class, we were given a story named “The Hawk.” It was short, which I liked and looked interesting. When Professor Brod said “read and annotate” this was easy for me. I read it and annotated it and brought it back into class. He told us about some tips we could do to annotate this even better. When first annotating, “The Hawk”, all I did was underline things I believed to be important. I read it one time, then went back and underlined the things I remembered and thought I could use on a paper. It was sloppy and messy which made it hard to look back on when writing my paper. As shown below, you can see my annotations are just a few underlines and marking random things I thought were interesting.
Annotations from “The Hawk”
Though, throughout the year, using “They Say, I Say” and the brief guide annotating got more meaningful and helpful for me. When approaching a word, I was unsure of it, I looked it up and put the meaning on the paper, looked up the author to give background on why they wrote what they wrote, and used marginal notes. Using these techniques, my annotation becomes more useful and easier to look back on when writing my essays. I could easily look back and find a quote or paragraph that perfectly aligned with my essay. As shown, the improvement in annotation is tremendous. I use all the techniques and it looks much neater.
Annotations from “This is Water”
