Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking.

Framing statement: Annotating the source while reading it helps to maintain active reading. It can also help you find specific parts if the article is really long without re-reading the whole thing. It can also help you connect and understand the text. While I am reading without annotating, I will lose focus and start scanning over what it says, but if I am annotating while I read, it helps to make me think about the text more. Using the brief guide to annotations was very useful to think about what to write and helped me understand the text.

Work sample 1:

Analysis: In my annotations on the first page of Zadie Smith’s essay, I used multiple types of annotations from the brief guide to annotations. When annotating “The Hawk,” my annotations were mostly summarizing the essay, but when annotating Zadie Smith, only the blue is summary. This summary helps to understand the text and find parts you want to go back to later. Another annotation type I used was challenging where I pushed back against Smith when I said that joy is very different as a child compared to as an adult. I also made a text-to-world annotation where I compared an example Smith gave to how if bad things never happened, good things would just be normal. I turned all of these annotations into body paragraphs when I was writing my third essay. I used the summary to briefly give context to lead into my quote, challenging during my naysayer paragraph and when I push back against Smith, and text-to-world relation when I related Smith’s example to bad things needing to happen in order for good things to follow.

Work sample 2:

Analysis: This is a paragraph in my third essay that uses one of the annotations from above. In the annotations, I underlined the quote and wrote what I thought about it. Then, when I was writing my essay, I took that annotation, made a body paragraph from it, and explained my opinion about it.