Coming into English 110 my active reading skills and habits were very basic if not non existant. Up until now, when reading a piece of writing I would read it over once and not think much about it. I would get the basic knowledge and move on. I wouldn’t annotate anything, mark up the text, highlight sections or engage with it in any meaningful way. Needless to say when it came time to annotate and engage with the various texts in class I was very much out of my element and it became clear to me that I needed to make some changes to how I approached reading. After learning and experimenting with various annotation styles I could see what styles worked for me and I could see that I was improving. Out of all of the styles that I learned how to use, the chunking method quickly became my favorite. This method allows you to split up the text into multiple smaller, more digestible pieces that you can more easily analyze. When annotating these smaller pieces I used methods highlighted by Susan Gilroy such as marking up sections I thought were important, summarizing portions of the text so I could better understand it and constantly asking questions to make sure that I understood what was being said and was engaged with the text. At first it was difficult to decide what was worth annotating and what was relatively unimportant, but after annotating multiple texts I became better at identifying important pieces. As a general rule, anything relating to the main argument of the text was worth highlighting and analyzing in my opinion. I would also highlight pieces that confused me so that I could better understand them. By the end of the semester I could definitely notice the improvements I made to my revision process and I hope that I am able to keep this up throughout my college career.
Recent Comments