This first example of annotating is from the text “Conquering the Freshman Fear of Failure”. For this text, I choose to do a combination of highlighting and marking with pen. With the highlighter, I chose important points in the content. That way I could go back to the text and see important phrases. For this text, I also summarized each of the paragraphs in the margins. This is another way to quickly read through the text. While this method was effective for keeping track of the content of the story, it lacked effectiveness when it came to looking at the deeper meaning and making connections.
For this next example, I chose a very similar method. This is an annotation of the article “The Joy of Reading and Writing; Superman and Me”. Once again, I used a highlighter to select the important words and phrases in the text, so that they would stand out to me. I also used the pen to summarize each of the paragraphs in the margins. The additional step that I took included making connections. On the margin opposite of where I have summarized, I would write down any connection I made to the text. These connections were either text-to-self connections or text-to-text connections. By doing this, I was able to get a deeper comprehension of the text that I was reading. This was definitely the most effective annotating method that I used, and I will definitely use it again.
