Annotating is never something I look forward to doing as throughout high school we never did it or were told it was basically pointless based on our assignments. Even when needing to respond to questions about the readings we were assigned, all we had to do was highlight parts of the text we thought to be important or wanted to remember to use for our response later on. Coming into college I wasn’t assured with my annotating skills and remember being quite nervous when asked to annotate for the first time because I never has much experience. We then has to write a response relating to our annotations and the story we were reading. The annotations and response below are from when my class read This is Water by David Foster Wallace.
Through this response you can clearly see the correlation between the annotations and the reading response is strong as I used a quote I highlighted in my response. From the annotation stand point, they weren’t bad but they weren’t great. I kind of just highlighted what I thought was important, wrote what the sentence meant in simpler terms or how I understood it, and just jotted down random thoughts. It wasn’t very organized but got the job done. As for my reading response, I feel as if it is definitely strong as we started to use some paragraph structures at this point in the year and it included the annotations which is nice. It helped make it easier for me to go into essay writing as I had an example Barclay paragraph and experience taking my annotations and using them as supporting quotes.
We soon learned how to annotate using a guide where we were presented with six different types of annotations to look for while reading. Those types include understanding, extending, questioning, rhetoric, challenging, and exploring relationships. These guided me to making thoughtful annotations that made me think and come up with new ideas I could include in future reading responses and essays. Below is annotations from one of our readings, Is Empathy Overrated? by Paul Bloom, where I used these these annotation methods.
As you can see my annotations became more complex and thoughtful once I had some guidance and thought behind my annotating. I was able to think about each type of annotation while reading and almost every sentence or paragraph was able to spark a thought. It made annotating more meaningful in the writing process to me. There is also an abundance of them as I was able to really have an idea of how I was going to annotate.
As for my reading responses, those also became more complex. I was able to take my annotations and make good developed responses to my prompts. One thing that had changed though was how I wrote my responses. At the beginning of the year I focused on the quote and what the author was getting at in my responses. I have since learned that it is okay to use some of my own ideas and include them in my responses. This is present in my response to a more recent reading, Joy by Zadie smith.
“Joy is difficult to manage and live with according to Smith because it is a feeling that is simply put, bittersweet. Joy is a feeling of brief happiness that is soon followed by grief and shame. I agree with her to an extent as I do believe that joy can be negative and have that unsettling feeling after, but it is also associated with the best moments of my life and occurs more than just a few times. One sentence that really had me thinking was when she integrated a source from Julian Barnes stating, “It hurts just as much as it is worth” (Smith 7). This quote had me thinking, do I really feel the pain of losing joy just as intensely as the joy I feel itself? All I came up with was no. I do feel a bit of grief or pain once my joy has worn off, but I wouldn’t say it is overwhelming like Smith suggests. Of course it doesn’t feel great, but I could say the same as not being able to have a pleasure or when a pleasure is done. When she used her food example, I related to it as there are certain foods that give me pleasure. I do feel upset when I’m finished and maybe the feeling of pain may not be as strong as joy, but it’s close. There may be a difference between pleasure and joy, but I don’t believe it to be as juristic as Smith suggests in her text. I think that joy is manageable and can be lived with, you just must go about it in a way that works best for you.“
This example shows how I was able to use an annotation and my own personal experience to back why I used that annotation as well as the writer’s ideas. I was able to use all the skills I have learned over the course of the year to make a well developed and concise response to my reading question.
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