After the months that I’ve been in ENG 110 and the amount of time we’ve spent talking about active reading, I am now able to describe what really works for me. For this outcome, I’ve chosen to include the annotations from my second reading of Galen Strawson’s “I Am Not A Story” because I truly have a conversation with the text and my own thoughts. In order for me to get the most out of a reading, I like to underline the sentences that stick out the most to me and write question marks next to things I find confusing in order to find them faster later on. In the text from Susan Gilroy, I do the same thing. In the third line, she says that annotating is a way to have an ongoing conversation with yourself, which I underlined and even wrote that I liked this sentence. Because I find that I take an “assertive” approach to active reading, I find that I underline and mark up the text quite a bit. With the thousands of thoughts running through my head, it’s best to write down all the (somewhat sarcastic) comments and questions I have before I forget them.
Though it may be too much, having so many notes on the paper is better than taking a passive approach and not having enough to look back on and reflect on my thoughts when it comes to writing a paper. I did the same thing when I read through Gilroy’s text. For such a short bit of writing, I have a lot of notes about that I like what she says about how you talk with the readings and your own thoughts. Also about how it’s possible for your thinking and approach to the topic can be altered by what you read.
After all of the work we’ve done in class with active, critical reading I now know how to pull out the important information from assigned texts and how to question the texts to be able to create my own thoughts about the topic.
