When reading a piece of text, I like to completely read it over once before I begin annotating. If I am only worrying about what to focus on or what to highlight, I won’t actually absorb all of the information I would normally get from reading the piece. After reading it once through, I begin reading through it again; this time I will look for sentences or phrases that stick out to me or sound important. I try to find claims that the authors are making and how they arrived at the idea. Once I see things that stand out to me, I highlight them and usually write myself a little note beside it on what that sentence made me think about. Sometimes I only highlight something and don’t write any notes because I either wasn’t sure what I thought of it at the time, or it was so obvious what the quote made me think that I didn’t need the note as a reminder. One example of this is in my annotations of They Say, I Say: I highlighted sentences or groups of sentences that I thought were important but I didn’t make any notes to go along with them. The reason I didn’t make any notes was because I thought the quotes I chose spoke for themselves and that they would help me with my work even if I didn’t add my own note to them. In most of my annotations for the Dalai Lama paper, I put a star next to a highlighted sentence and wrote “Claim”. This is because I really only highlighted what I believed to be claims that Lama was making throughout the paper. I didn’t think that any additional notes from me were necessary. In Balch’s paper, however, sometimes I would add my own notes to highlighted pieces so I could remember what I wanted to say about a certain quote or because I didn’t understand it. I definitely still could use improvement on my annotating abilities, but I believe that this course has already made me improve by forcing me out of my comfort zone and making me really take the time to annotate texts.
In HW-12, I picked out a quote and a paraphrase from Titus Kaphar, as well as summarizing the TedTalk. These acted as my annotations for Kaphar.
They Say, I Say Annotations
