Empoword

Appendix B: Engaged Reading Strategies 471 Annotation Annotation is the most common and one of the most useful engaged reading strategies. You might know it better as “marking up” a text. Annotating a reading is visual evidence to your teacher that you read something—but more importantly, it allows you to focus on the text itself by asking questions and making notes to yourself to spark your memory later. Take a look at the sample annotation on the next page. Note that the reader here is doing several different things: • Underlining important words, phrases, and sentences. Many studies have shown that underlining or highlighting alone does not improve comprehension or recall; however, limited underlining can draw your eye back to curious phrases as you re-read, discuss, or analyze a text. • Writing marginal notes. Even though you can’t fit complex ideas in the margins, you can: o use keywords to spark your memory, o track your reactions, o remind yourself where an important argument is, o define unfamiliar words, o draw illustrations to think through an image or idea visually, or o make connections to other texts. In addition to taking notes directly on the text itself, you might also write a brief summary with any white space left on the page. As we learned in Chapter Two, summarizing will help you process information, ensure that you understand what you’ve read, and make choices about which elements of the text to focus on. For a more guided process for annotating an argument, follow these steps from Brian Gazaille , 139 a teacher at University of Oregon: Most “kits” that you find in novelty stores give you materials and instructions about how to construct an object: a model plane, a bicycle, a dollhouse. This kit asks you to deconstruct one of our readings, identifying its thesis, breaking down its argument, and calling attention to the ways it supports its ideas. Dissecting a text is no easy task, and this assignment is designed to help you understand the logic and rhetoric behind what you just read.