Throughout the entire semester, English 110 has encouraged annotating, it has proven to be an essential milestone and ability throughout the course. It is such a crucial task due to it allowing a reader to be engaged with the text rather than memorizing the central idea. In agreement with this central learning goal, Susan Gilroy states how “Annotating puts you actively and immediately in a ‘dialogue’ with an author and the issues and ideas you encounter in a written text”(1). Susan is basically elaborating on how annotating allows for relationships between texts to be made, questioning to take place and much more. Prior to this course I was never asked to annotate much, I only had to complete a couple assignments here and there. And due to this I often viewed texts as autonomous and correct, I never questioned claims or validity. With this said, at the beginning of the semester I struggled immensely with annotating. It took me awhile to form comments. I have especially never been asked to focus on asking questions, understanding, establishing relationships to other texts, and challenging what the author states for my annotating, which made the task more difficult in my eyes. Before English 110, I thought of annotating as random side comments and highlighting for understanding, another tool to practically memorize what the text is saying. But as the semester moved along, my previous knowledge change. My ability to annotate effectively and efficiently increased as time went by. I no longer had to deliberately think of a questioning comment for example, it just came to me. One thing that I have noticed over the semester, is that I majorly rely on relation for my annotations, which can be seen below throughout Gee’s Building Tasks annotations. It is also evident that I still maintained highlighting prior to this course in addition to annotating for understanding, this can also be seen in the images below. With everything stated, I believe my ability to interrogate texts is strong. Yet, I noticed that I often struggle with asking questions throughout the text, I often don’t question until I finish the piece. Perhaps in the future I can read twice and on the second time add questions for annotations. Also, I need to be more open minded when it comes to reading pieces, I need to question authors works and not view texts as reliable and autonomous.
Annotations for October Fourth – Second Paper Sources
Both of these images show a relating quote, it relates to Gee’s previous texts that we worked with in the semester.
One of these quotes shows a relation quote to Amy Cuddy’s text as well as a challenging quote, I don’t agree with one of the claims that Gee makes in this text.
Both of these quotes shows a relation quote to IMRAD Cheat Sheet text as well as Gee’s previous texts.
