Before the class started, I had a few techniques from high school that had to do with annotating. I mostly knew how to point out ideas in paragraphs and maybe ask a few questions along the way. In the beginning of this semester, I knew I had room for improvement. Starting out, the types of annotations that I would write were mostly under the category of understanding. I would mostly summarize paragraphs to put the concepts into my own words and I would define a few terms. It is definitely evident here in the first reading we had to do, from page 1-32, on how I would only shortly paraphrase the paragraphs.

This is showing all of the summaries I had on the assignment page. I would take each paragraph and write what I got out of it.

Once we moved onto more readings, this is when I started to look at the other types of categories and start to incorporate them. Going onto Gilberts, “Reporting Live From Tomorrow”, I made sure that I not only summarized, by I would also mark questions and point out areas where I would disagree. I would also make connections to personal experiences. As seen here on page 176 where I stared, I made a connection to the text from a past experience I had in high school. In the text, it talked about how money cannot buy you happiness, and I remembered in high school we had a debate whether money was the true scores of happiness and why we felt the way we did. I agreed and disagreed with Gilbert, because although I feel having a stable income can make you happy, when you have too much, it does not make you much happier than you were with the stable outcome. I made sure to mark this in the text.

This is where I connect the text to my English class debate from Sophomore year.

Today, I feel like I have a strong grasp on how to annotate but there are some areas to work on. When it comes to Brooks and Wadlinger, I made sure that I pointed out understanding annotations, connections, and questions. In “The Moral Bucket List”, I made a connection from Gilberts to Brooks wrting. In Gilbert’s writing, he spoke about how women would rather go shopping or watch tv rather than taking care of their kids. Brooks, however, talked about how Dorthy day became a better person from having children. I made sure I marked this as you can see from the star. Even with all my annotations, the two that I have the most trouble with are challenging and rhetorical. As we move onto more readings, I am hoping that I can start pointing out these out.

This is where I connect the text to Gilberts book. This text shows children can make someone happy. Gilbert disagrees with this fact.