Active Reading
My most prominent strategy in active reading is annotating for the purpose of simplification. Many annotations I made throughout English 110 were summarizing main points being made to better understand the reading. In addition to these annotations I also favored making comments to question the work. By both summarizing and then questioning readings, I am showing my ability to interrogate the true meaning or overarching concepts of the work. In class we discussed making text-to-text, text-to-world, and text-to-self connections. Throughout my annotations the most common connection I used was text-to-text. This is because readings often came in sets of about three, and were grouped in such a way to support and complicate one another. When reading I would annotate to connect to one of the other readings in the grouping to help compare and contrast them.
“Interrogating Texts: 6 Reading Habits to Develop in Your First Year at Harvard” discusses my most common annotation strategy, “Take the information apart, look at its parts, and then try to put it back together again in language that is meaningful to you” (Gilroy). Taking information and summarizing it in my own words helped me a lot in both reading and analyzing Alexander and Brandt which were two of the sources I used in my significant writing project. In Alexander I do this when making an annotation on the term “Master Narrative”, and then again in Brandt when clarifying “Literacy-as-success”.
Annotations on Alexander(1) and Brandt(2)
