Active Reading-Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking.
Active reading is the best way to fully understand a text. The deeper you analyze a work of writing, the easier it is to think critically. This allows the reader to connect the material to their own experiences and knowledge, making writing about a topic more engaging. To me, annotating is one of the most critical parts of active reading. It helps me keep track of the key aspects of a piece of writing, but helps me organize and remember my own thoughts while reading as well. Critical reading allows me to raise questions of my own and comprehend the author’s thoughts to find the answers.
In the photographs attached below, I have provided examples of my annotations of “The Devil’s Bait” by Leslie Jamison. My first step when reading activity is to go all the way through the text once. Sometimes I will highlight ideas that appear to be obvious so I can come back to them later. After the first time through, I go back and read the text meticulously, underlining more important places, concepts I have questions on, and write marginal notes to keep track of all my thoughts. This essay was one we read about halfway through the semester so I had improved my annotation techniques from when we first started, but I have also learned ways I can organize my thoughts more clearly and how to ask better analytical questions that I can then expand on in my own writing. There is a lot going on in the annotations below, but this reading was one that was interesting to engage with and had a lot for me to think about.
Here are specific examples of the different types of annotations found in the pictures below.
Questioning: Annotations that ask questions or figure out things in the text
Picture 2, left side of the page.
“why do the docs go through such lengths to write these people off as crazy?”
“why don’t people believe them? There are lots of people who suffer from this, so how do they think they’re all just crazy?”
Understanding: Annotations that key to understanding sections of the text
Picture 2, bottom right section of the page.
“people look to doctors and to medicine w/ trust in them and their knowledge. These people aren’t being listened to and not being taken seriously by docs who should be able to figure out what is going on”
Picture 4, bottom left side of page.
“Dangers of science and seeing everything just as facts. You have to be able to be willing to discuss new things/ideas”
Challenging or Extending: Annotations that point to where I challenge parts of the reading, or to places where I took the authors idea a step forward and included my own.
Picture 4, top of the second column. Here I am noting my thoughts on the highlighted section of writing.
“have to convince them they’re not crazy or on drugs”
Relating: annotations that connect different sections of the text.
Picture 3, bottom right side of the page.
“mental illness seems to have become a scapegoat for logic, thinking, and reasoning.”
Figure 1.) “The Devil’s Bait” pg. 1-4 annotations.
In ENG 110, reading a text and then writing a response to what we read has been an excellent way of solidifying ideas I developed after annotating. This is something that helped me improve my writing skills over the course of the semester tremendously. It forced me to think about the text and put my thoughts on paper. These responses are something that I would often turn back to when mapping out a larger essay. It guided me where I needed to bring my own ideas and the authors together. The picture below is a response I wrote to Paul Bloom’s essay “Is Empathy Overrated?”. This response helped me express my ideas on the topics discussed in his essay as well as relate them to an earlier piece we read by Wallace. This response specifically is one I found very helpful to write about and was very helpful after-the-fact when approaching my layout for Essay #2.
Figure 2.) My response to “Is Empathy Overrated?”. Sections highlighted in yellow represent the analysis of topics from Bloom’s essay as well as my own ideas associated with them. Sections highlighted in red are quotes I included after actively reading the text.
