At the beginning of this class, I thought I had a good grasp on how to annotate and engage myself with the text. I was wrong and realized that shortly after reading the first essay assigned. I was struggling with fully understanding the text and making thoughtful annotations. After some practice, I found things that helped me comprehend more and developing my arguments for papers became easier.

I found reading the prompts for the papers before reading the articles assigned helped narrow my focus while reading since I had the prompt in the back of my mind. I was underlining things that stuck out to me and highlighting important themes or ideas I found throughout the readings. I liked what Susan Gilroy said: “take the information apart, look at its parts, and then try to put it back together again in language that is meaningful to you…” This I found extremely helpful and a skill I’ve adapted in order to interpret texts better. Some of the sentences were ‘too fancy’ in my eyes and breaking it down and simplifying it in the margins helped me get the bigger picture of the paper. I also found circling words I did not know and defining them helped with my comprehension of texts as well.

I often times found writing questions in the margins and “reading against the grain” was helpful in developing my argument. I didn’t always agree with the ideas of the author and this helped me find evidence on how their ideas are different than mine. I feel after this semester my active reading skills have improved immensely and reading big dense essays aren’t as intimidating as before. Sometimes you just have to work a little harder in order to understand the ideas the author is trying to convey.