Outcome 3 (Active Reading) – Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking. (492 words)

Active reading was a concept I disliked prior to this semester. In high school, annotations felt like busywork. I struggled to find ways to address my thoughts on a piece I was meant to annotate when the entire time, the end goal of said annotations wasn’t clear. Often, I felt like annotations had no point and were just there to waste time, but my work this semester has proven this to the contrary.

I had a much easier time doing annotations for this class. Having the framework of annotation styles helped me know what to look for when I was going through a reading and good annotations made me understand a piece much more in depth than if I had read without them. In a way, annotations guided my reading, causing me to look more critically and form my views while reading instead of revisiting an essay/piece weeks later to write a lackluster paper on it. There were styles of annotations given on our “Brief Guide to Annotations” handout and some annotation styles that I used frequently were understanding, challenging/questioning (I tended to blur these together), and exploring relationships. 

An example of where understanding annotations helped me a lot was in David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water.” I wrote what I took from each passage very often within the piece as “This is Water” is incredibly complex. Below is an example of one of these understanding annotations from “This is Water”:

Here is an example of where I used these understanding annotations to help me restate one of DFW’s points:

Challenging and Questioning were another two annotation types I used liberally throughout my reading process, particularly in Paul Bloom’s “Is Empathy Overrated”. These annotations helped me form my opinions and put myself directly in conversation with what the author was trying to argue. Below is a sample of my annotations:

I also brought up similar points as those in my annotations in my second essay as seen below.

The exploring relationships annotation type helped me form my arguments, similarly to that of the challenging/question annotations. “Unfollow” by Adrian Chen has a particularly strong example of this annotation:

Here we can see this idea in action within my first essay:

Informal reading responses were also huge for me when it came to digesting source material and starting to formulate my thoughts on them. Bloom is an author I continuously used throughout my work in this class, as I found my opinion of him changed rather quickly from somewhat understanding his point of view to almost vehemently disagreeing with it. Here is an excerpt from my “Bloom Reading Response” where we can see my initial take on his piece “Is Empathy Overrated”. 

Putting this excerpt in direct contrast to how I formulated my thoughts in my final essay #2 is interesting to examine, as the informal reading response set the groundwork for me to expand upon in my essay, as seen below: