Outcome 3 (Active Reading) – Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking.

When annotating, I’ve always been one to briefly read over the article, and then go back and add annotations. If I couldn’t find enough information to annotate, I would underline random things because I’ve never really been taught how to annotate. It’s more-so something teachers just expect you know how to do. So in this class, when we received the “Brief Guide to Annotations” it was very helpful. I often looked back on it, but once we got to our third and fourth readings I was comfortable with the material on the guide sheet. 

At the beginning of this class, I tried a little bit of everything. I used all the different annotation types, Understanding, Questioning, Exploring Relationships, Extending, Challenging, and Rhetorical. I soon realized that my focus was finding places where all these annotations would fit, but it began to take away from the actual reading. My focus wasn’t on understanding the content of the article, it was trying to find the right spot for the specific annotations. So, as the semester progressed, I realized that I should read to understand the article, and annotations are something I can add as it comes to my head. I began to have favorites, specific annotations started to work for me, such as “challenging” the writer and “understanding” the piece. Those two I found myself focusing more on. 

Here’s an example from The Limits of Friendship by Maria Konnikova (2nd Page, 2nd and 3rd paragraph) 

This shows two of my annotations, one helping me understand the setting and time period of the piece. And the other is challenging/pushing back on the writer. I was challenging the fact that “the number of people the average person could have in her social group was a hundred and fifty.” I thought that was way too big, so I made an annotation to push back. I tend to leave quick annotations, sometimes only ones that I can understand, but jotting down quick ideas helps me as I read.

I also experimented with “Extending” and “Exploring Relationships” In the next example, pay attention to not only those two annotations, but also how I add brief thoughts to help my own understanding.

Here’s an example from the same piece, “The Limits of Friendship.” (2nd page, 3rd paragraph)

As you can tell, I continued to use understanding as an annotation method, but I experimented a bit trying others. I still believe Understanding and Challenging are the two types that work best for me.

Another thing I want to look at is how my reading response answers actually helped me develop a paragraph in one of my essays.

This example is from Paul Bloom’s piece, “Is Empathy Overrated?” The question asked was, In two healthy paragraphs, summarize the piece AND show (with framed quotes and paraphrase from the text) what you believe to be the author’s three main points/arguments.

Writing the response helped me draft a paragraph for Essay #2. Since I had to think about what we’re Bloom’s points and not just that they were controversial, but how they were controversial, helped me create a well-crafted, nuanced paragraph. It helped me push back on Bloom, and establish my own perspective.

This example is from Essay #2, at the beginning of Paragraph #2. I want you to pay attention to how I used the same quote as my reading response “…Here your empathy is silent” and how I built off of it.

Overall, I’ve used my reading responses many times to construct a paragraph in one of my essays, and it’s a good tool to use when you are having a hard time brainstorming ideas. In this case, it helped me push back on Bloom and challenge his perspective.