I do not think I have ever really been that great at reading and annotating a piece of writing. I tend to highlight too much and not pick out ideas through reading the text. This semester, I think that I have gotten better at annotating. Most of my classes have been requiring me to do work like this, making this area of work stronger for me. For the first piece of writing, I think I did a good job connecting the other writings we were working with to this. Although it was pretty short, I think I was able to pick out the main ideas and utilize important ideas from it. I also related it back to our first project based around growth mindsets. I made notes to myself such as “main goal” of what I thought the article was about. For the second piece of writing, I think I really related and connected the article to real life. The comments I made are comments about things that I believe should be brought to attention as well as things we as humans tend to teach kids. This relates to Gilroy’s idea of how annotating is like talking to yourself throughout reading. In the last writing, I picked out a word I was not sure about and wrote the definition. This helps me to understand the text being read, which is always a good thing to do while reading. There were also many different terms and ideas used that I tried to separate using a different color pen and highlighting. Gilroy says that this is taking the information apart and putting it back together in a way that makes sense for you, the reader. When deciding what to mark and discuss, I looked at the main idea of that section or the writing and then picked out what I thought would be the key points in this area. Things I still need to work on for annotations would be questioning, challenging, and rhetorical within the texts. For me I have a hard time arguing with the author, as they are published writers. Even if I may not agree with what they are saying, I have a hard time pushing into these areas.
