My critical reading and analyzing skills are much stronger now than they were at the beginning of the semester. In the beginning of the semester most of my marks on literature for active reading consisted of highlights of things that seemed important and questions marks by things that didn’t make sense or that I didn’t understand the relevancy of. As the semester progressed I believe that I began to make more insightful comments on reading assignments and that I began to read more in depth and take the meaning behind the paper more seriously than I had previously. I think that in the beginning I was more concerned with getting through the material and being able to answer the corresponding questions, as I had throughout my high school literature courses, but as the course progressed I realized that I would not simply be able to highlight and underline and be able to have full understanding of the material and be able to translate it into my own ideas and writing. After I realized this I took active reading more seriously in order to be more successful in my own writing and understanding, I made more thoughtful comments and began to question things that authors were saying instead of simply agreeing with it because they wrote the paper. I think that doing this made my papers stronger, I was using my own opinions and ideas more often than regurgitating what was provided by the literature.
Below is an example of active reading that I took from earlier on in the semester when we were James Gee’s work on Discourses. As you can see from the pictures that majority of the markings on the paper are certain phrases that are underline or bracketed, there are very few comments on the sides and where there are comments that are very vague and don’t expand on anything from the literature.
Below are annotations from active reading taken from later on in the semester from one of the literacy narratives I read. The annotations from this reading are much more in depth and have more comments questioning and agreeing with things that were said in the paper. Using these annotations help to create an outline for my ideas for my paper, as opposed to the annotations from earlier in the semester that were hardly helpful when it came time to write the paper.
