(Active Reading) – Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking.

In high school I never annotated the pieces that we were supposed to read to be honest I usually didn’t even read what was assigned in high school and just prayed that I wouldn’t get called on. So annotating has definitely been a new experience for me. When Mr. Brod handed out the brief guide to annotations I honestly thought to myself oh great looks like even more work. But through the course of the semester I have seen how my annotations have been able to help me gain a deeper understanding of what I’m reading and it helps me better remember the material better when I annotate it. Annotations have helped me out this semester in a few ways. Number one annotations make it easy to quickly look back and reference key passages without having to go back and read a whole page so it definitely saves time. Number two I can remind myself of details and connections I noticed when I’m looking back. Number three I can go back and build upon the annotation later to make it a more well rounded and thought out idea. Number four when I see unfamiliar words I look them up and then I know them for future readings. Number five annotations help me slow down when I’m reading so I can better comprehend and better remember the text.

Below is an example of my annotations from the Paul Bloom reading

By annotating I was automatically able to remember how I felt and some of the questions I had the first time reading this through. I also wrote about a relevant connections to the world today such as the Ukraine war. The idea that people have more empathy for people close to them is the same reason why we have stopped seeing the war in Ukraine on TV it doesn’t mean that its not still going on it just means that those people in danger aren’t us or anyone we know so we stop caring about it its a pretty weird concept when you think about it. I was able to bring up some of my ideas feeling and connections that I originally made in the annotations in my reading responses for this piece as seen below.

As you can see in my response to the reading questions I brought up several points from my annotations and was able to really expand them and make them flow in order to answer the questions being asked to the best of my ability. My annotations definitely helped me back up my claims and make my stance even more clear to the reader.