Throughout my education I was taught using a highlighter was a must, and to highlight “key terms” or “passages”. It wasn’t until after I did the first annotation assignment that I realized I was doing it wrong the whole time.

You can clearly see in the first assignment that I highlighted almost everything, with not much to say on why I highlighted it. Although I was drawing facts, claims, and evidence to support my thesis like I was taught in high school, I wasn’t understanding the author’s real purpose, or seeing how the author used certain individuals to make a point. Furthermore, I developed the ability to quickly preview my reading prior to actually reading them because for me I found it does help me better understand what topic I am going to be learning and the authors stand on that topic.

Learning what to mark was easy at this point because I just learned anything that “drew my attention” or “made me question” what the author was saying was worth actually annotating. I’ve also found just quickly analyzing the text that stands out the most to me and writing why I circled/underlined that specific text right then and there, because if I end up waiting until I finish to go back and analyze I end up forgetting why I highlighted that certain text.

In conclusion, I’ve learned lots of skills from the articles and text we’ve been required to analyze, and I feel the ability to question, connect, challenge the authors text has made it a hundred times easier to develop your own personal claim on the matter and create an article/essay of your own, from your own standpoint.