As a person that has taken an English class every year in school since she was in kindergarten, I thought I know exactly how to annotate articles and read 100 pages in a textbook I was mistakenly wrong. I always thought annotating was just underlining and circling words that meant something to someone or sounded important or sounded smart. I have been doing this for so long that it took me a while to change how I was annotating. Doing my annotations wrong all this time did mess me up. I was once told something that has always stuck with me “Practice makes permanent not practice makes perfect” doing something over and over again will be drilled into your head even if it is not correct and it takes time to change how you do things if you have done it for years. Now taking this class it has taught me that there is so much more than underlining and circling. You want to fill the page with your thought and ideas about that specific reading. Write if it makes you feel happy or sad. Sometimes I write on the side if that specific article reminds me of a past article I read. I like to now ask questions or even sometimes argue with what the writer is saying. In Susan Gilory’s statement she says “Mark up the margins of your text with words and phrases: ideas that occur to you, notes about things that seem important to you, reminders of how issues in a text may connect with class discussion or course themes…. Get in the habit of hearing yourself ask questions: “What does this mean?” “Why is the writer drawing that conclusion?” “Why am I being asked to read this text?” I really listened to Gilroy because this is everything that I started to do and it helps me in too many ways. I also learned that not everything needs to be underlined. I learned how to find specific things that should and need to be underlined. Analyzing every article in class helped me become an all-around better writer and even student for my other classes I am taking now and this will help me in my future classes.
