Throughout the semester when we had to annotate our readings we were given I tended to have a certain way I went about reading and annotating the prompts. I first read the entire essay and made small comments throughout while I was reading on anything I felt was important. Examples of what I did were circling a word, underlining a sentence, writing a small note in the margin, etc. When I was going through and reading I was mostly looking for certain words or statements that cycled back to the main topic of what the reading was about and what the overall main idea was. For example our first annotation was Sherry Turkle’s “Empathy Diaries” I made sure to highlight or underline any statements in the reading that either supported her claim about conversation and empathy or whether it backed up the claim. I also had this strategy to bracket large statements of a paragraph I felt was important to highlight. Being able to bracket a large statement that had multiple lines was more effective than highlighting each line individual. The way I went about what I was looking for was a good strategy because it helped me when it came to us having to use that essay as a source for our project. I already had important quotes highlighted so it was easy to pick which ones were better to use in my project. When there was something said in the text that I was not quite familiar with I put a little question mark next to it, to represent as if I was asking the writer what that meant. I felt overall the way I went about reading and annotating the text we had set me up well for our project and led me to use the source very well.
