Outcome 3 (Active Reading) – Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking.
To be brutally honest, I dislike annotating. I know it is very important, but I have a tough time staying focused enough while reading to annotate. During high school I would annotate by highlighting anything I felt important. I didn’t really understand why I was highlighting it, I just thought that it might be helpful in the future. However, I would never go back to annotate. This changed during the first semester. I learned that the five different types of annotations I can make are understanding, questioning, relating, challenging or extending, and rhetorical. With these five different annotations I was able to find meaning behind my annotations and actually found myself using my annotations to help navigate my way through the sources we would read. Even though I still don’t truly like annotating I have found out that it can be very helpful if done correctly.
While reading “The Limits of Friendship” by Maria Konnikova I made several annotations. The annotations you see in the images below consist of some relating, questioning, and understanding.
I was able to use these annotations to help answer my reading response questions. Even though my answers might not connect directly to these annotations shown, I used the annotations to help build my thoughts and answer the questions with deeper meaning. (see reading response in image below)
In this second example, I had an annotation in Paul Blooms “Is Empathy Overrated?” essay that would be considered extending on the author’s ideas. (see image below)
You might not be able to see what I wrote, so it says “I sort of agree, it makes sense with w/ the parent example. But not every suffering moment has to be a lesson”. I was extending on Bloom’s idea that “those who are high in empathy can be too caught up in the suffering of other people”(Bloom 2) This annotation helped me build into a bigger idea that I focus on in one of my reading response answers.(see image below)
