Annotation
Please be sure you carefully read over this page multiple times.
Annotation is quite possibly the most important skill you will learn and practice this year. It is certainly in the top five. Some of you may have been exposed to the idea of annotation or required by your previous teachers to annotate texts in various ways. You may have also heard it called active reading, marking texts, or marginalia. I will expect you to annotate EVERY text that you read in English class this year. If you develop a sound system and habit of annotating assigned texts in each of your classes, I promise you will learn more, study faster and more effectively, and earn better grades.
What is Annotation?
Annotating is deeply reading a text and marking it with notes, comments and questions. This prepares the reader for for further study and understanding. Annotation takes place most frequently with assigned reading, but you might be surprised at how it can enrich your leisure reading if you try it!
Why should I annotate my texts?
It may surprise you to know this, but all of your teachers are expecting you to THINK as you read the material for their classes! When you annotate, you are making a record of the thinking that happens as you read. If you are reading without annotating, you may be doing nothing more than running your eyes over words on the page. You may be mentally "checked out." Annotation can help keep you focused. Moreover, you know that you're likely to be quizzed and tested over the reading teachers assign. With the very rare exceptions of some unusual savants (look up eidetic memory), none of us remembers everything we read. To use a metaphor, annotation provides you a trail of breadcrumbs of important events and ideas back through the text which will be helpful to you as you study, participate in class discussions and prepare for tests. One of the most important reasons that your English teachers at STA have switched to having you buy your own copies of the novels we will read is so that you can annotate directly in your book.
How do I annotate texts?
This is not a simple question. There are as many ways to annotate texts as there are readers, and no two readers annotate alike. You will want to experiment and practice this year in order to develop annotating skills that are effective for you and your learning.
Consider:
You will want to be able to adjust your annotation styles for different reading tasks. One important way to do this is to set a purpose for yourself. Sometimes your teacher will set the purpose for you (Ex: Be sure you can name all of the organelles within cells or Know the events in the story of Jeremiah), and sometimes you will have to think about what your purpose is (Ex: Ms. Smith will probably quiz us over the three causes of the Civil War or I need to know more about the characters at the beginning of To Kill a Mockingbird). Notes and summaries to yourself, reactions, questions, connections, unfamiliar vocabulary, literary devices and big, important ideas (themes) are all items that are worth annotating for a fiction text in an English class.
I've never erased any annotations from my books I've read and marked during high school, college or beyond, but this suggestion from teacher Trent Lorcher is funny, "Write notes in the margins. Pencil is easy to erase. If you write something really stupid in pen, it will be there for years, reminding you just how stupid you used to be." An optimist would think of it the opposite way. If you annotate, years later you can look back and realize how incredibly smart you have become!
The only wrong way to annotate is to NOT annotate.
Consider:
- Fiction (English class) vs. Nonfiction texts (Science/Social Studies)
- Easy texts (familiar with ideas/language) vs. Difficult texts (new ideas/complex vocabulary or style)
- Paper texts vs. Digital texts (yes, you can still annotate on an e-reader/computer)
- Marking directly on a text (handouts/your novels) vs. Having to use post-its, etc. (reference books/textbooks)
- Multiple colors/highlighters vs. A single pen/pencil
You will want to be able to adjust your annotation styles for different reading tasks. One important way to do this is to set a purpose for yourself. Sometimes your teacher will set the purpose for you (Ex: Be sure you can name all of the organelles within cells or Know the events in the story of Jeremiah), and sometimes you will have to think about what your purpose is (Ex: Ms. Smith will probably quiz us over the three causes of the Civil War or I need to know more about the characters at the beginning of To Kill a Mockingbird). Notes and summaries to yourself, reactions, questions, connections, unfamiliar vocabulary, literary devices and big, important ideas (themes) are all items that are worth annotating for a fiction text in an English class.
I've never erased any annotations from my books I've read and marked during high school, college or beyond, but this suggestion from teacher Trent Lorcher is funny, "Write notes in the margins. Pencil is easy to erase. If you write something really stupid in pen, it will be there for years, reminding you just how stupid you used to be." An optimist would think of it the opposite way. If you annotate, years later you can look back and realize how incredibly smart you have become!
The only wrong way to annotate is to NOT annotate.
A cautionary NOTE ABOUT HIGHLIGHTERS
I couldn't be an English teacher if I didn't love school supplies. New sticks of chalk, rainbows of pens, packages of post-it notes, smooth new notebooks awaiting my writing and bright yellow, flourescent highlighters make me ecstatic. Used well, he highlighter is a powerful tool for calling attention back to the most important words or phrases in a reading passage. Used poorly, it takes the reader back to square one. Highlighting everything is the same as highlighting nothing. If the page is primarily blue, pink, yellow, or even a technicolor rainbow when you finish, you are not using a highlighter as an effective tool; you may even be using it as a crayon (don't be distracted by filling in or neatening up). Your page should be primarily UN-highlighted in order to make key phrases POP off the page at you! If you need any further confirmation of this, just look at the page you are reading right now. That yellow text jumps right out!
Time to TRY this on
For practice, try annotating the article "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer J. Adler that is posted here. You may want to print it or you may use a .pdf annotation program and save your annotated copy. Your purpose is to understand why Adler thinks marking books is important and understand his system, so you can begin to develop your own annotation system to use as you read books in class this year.