~ How I annotate and why is it important? ~

A lot of people tend to annotate in various different ways. The way I annotate may be completely different than how my 4th grade teacher annotates. (Mrs. Cherry if you somehow find this I just wanted to say I love you!) Here are the different ways i annotate....

• Summarize what the author says in MY OWN word (makes sense to me )
• write down definitions and words I may not understand.
• I highlight a lot but... on the Elbow passage I highlighted many characteristics about the two types of thinking.
• On the top of the page I write down things that the author groups from other pages or paragraphs. 
• When i draw the fancy brackets { } I tend to use them when I summarize a paragraph.
• Whenever I have a question I write it down and draw a nice big "?" next to it. 

I've learned that there is no wrong way to annotate a text, as long as it makes sense to you and you fully understand what you're writing down there is no wrong answer. For example, when Sarah and I talked about our ways of annotating we had a lot of similarities. I think that is due to the fact that we came from the same school. Sarah also had different ways that I didn't have, she would star things that she thought would be important to her or when she found something that she relates to in a text she stars that too.

Annotating text is very useful because you're understanding the passage more than you just reading words. You write a little note about what you just read. For example, if you're reading a book and need to go back because you are writing a paper on the book you can go back and look at the annotations to remind you what you are reading, instead of just skimming the pages.