This semester we have worked a lot on annotating, starting with a reading called “Interrogating Texts: 6 Readings Habits to Develop in Your First Year at Harvard,” by Susan Gilroy. I did a lot of annotations in my high school English and history classes, so a lot of the information Gilroy talked about were things I had practiced before. While annotating, I tend to do a lot of text to world, text to self, and questions. These annotations are usually really helpful when I go back to look at them while writing essays. A lot of the time I’ll pull rhetorical questions straight from my annotations and elaborate on them in my essays. Some of my annotations are a little less helpful than others though. Every once in a while I’ll respond really casually to something the author said. I could argue that those comments are good and bad to have. Sometimes they are a good way to break up/make the reading more fun if I am losing focus; however, while these comments are often entertaining for me to look back on, they are not always super helpful while I’m writing my essays.
One thing I could work on is the coding aspect of annotating. One piece of advice we received was using symbols to help us navigate our annotations later on. I can not say that this is something that I did while annotating. I think using symbols is easier when you are annotating on a paper copy, but on my computer, I didn’t think of it while I was writing.
Typically the things I annotate are lines or big points that stand out to me either because of content or the ways it was written. My annotations come from what I think is interesting and what I want to talk more about. In the Jamison reading I had a lot of annotations, partially because I found the reading so interesting.
Devil’s Bait Part 1 is a blog post I did about how Leslie Jamison approaches empathy. In this post I included five quotes from the text and a brief analysis of what I saw the author doing. This is one post where I think I probably could have summarized a little less and gone further into the analysis, but overall the post addresses the prompt fairly well.
