My personal approach to active and critical reading involves a lot of annotation and tends to require a lot of time. If I am going to thoroughly read something (especially in this class) I enjoy taking notes on the text and responding to the author in the margins. I also like to highlight and underline important sentences that I could potentially use as quotes once writing my paper. I decided what to mark or discuss by what the prompt to the paper entailed as well as what I found to be relevant and intriguing to my own interests. I believe this helps my ability to interrogate readings because if I am focused on not only just what could be useful in my paper, but what I find interesting as well, I will be more apt to be passionate about what I choose to put in my paper. Another thing to take into consideration is all of the practice that we had in class with active reading strategies. I found the time we spent in class discussing how to annotate better extremely beneficial. I had only annotated papers for the first time last year and we did not go in depth at all, so this class has been very enlightening. Susan Gilroy’s selection was very interesting to read because I feel as though a lot of her ideas were concepts that we went over in class. Especially when she wrote about how annotating puts you in a dialogue with an author. For the most part, I believe I have mastered the “mark up the margins of your text with words and phrases” piece that Gilroy mentioned. The only trouble that I heard that Gilroy spoke of was the outlining an argument but I believe that has greatly improved throughout being in this class.
