7 Strategy: Reading Actively by Annotating

• Read to find the main ideas and support. Use your purpose to read actively.
• Find the answers to your questions.
• Find definitions for vocabulary.
• Make connections between the text and your experience, between parts of the text, and between the text and other lectures or text by annotating.
• Use headings and transition words to identify relationships in the text

An active reading strategy for articles or textbooks is annotation. Think for a moment about what that word means. It means to add notes (an-NOTE-tate) to text that you are reading, to offer explanation, comments or opinions to the author’s words. Annotation takes practice, and the better you are at it, the better you will be at reading complicated articles.

Where to Make Notes

First, determine how you will annotate the text you are about to read. 

–If it is a printed article, you may be able to just write in the margins. A colored pen might make it easier to see than black or even blue. 

–If it is an article posted on the web, you could also use Hypothesis, which is a highlighting and annotating tool that you can use on the website and even share your notes with your instructor. Other note-taking plug-ins for web browsers might serve a similar function. Hypothesis is enabled on this book in digital form.

–If it is a textbook that you do not own (or wish to sell back), use Post-it notes to annotate in the margins.

–You can also use a notebook to keep written commentary as you read in any platform, digital or print. If you do this, be sure to leave enough information about the specific text you’re responding to that you can find it later if you need to. (Make notes about page number, which paragraph it is, or even short quotes to help you locate the passage again.)

What Notes to Make

Scan the document you are annotating. Some obvious clues will be apparent before you read it, such as titles or headers for sections. Read the first paragraph. Somewhere in the first (or possibly the second) paragraph should be a BIG IDEA about what the article is going to be about. In the margins, near the top, write down the big idea of the article in your own words. This shouldn’t be more than a phrase or a sentence. This big idea is likely the article’s thesis.

Underline or highlight topic sentences or phrases that express the main idea for that paragraph or section. Write in the margin next to what you’ve underlined a summary of the paragraph or the idea being expressed.

Connect related ideas by drawing arrows from one idea to another. Annotate those arrows with a phrase about how they are connected.

If you encounter an idea, word, or phrase you don’t understand, circle it and put a question mark in the margin that indicates an area of confusion. Write your question in the margin.

“Depending on the outcome of the assessment, the commission recommends to WHO which formerly endemic countries should be declared free of transmission, i.e., certified as free of the disease.” –> ?? What does this mean? Who is WHO?

Anytime the author makes a statement that you can connect with on a personal level, annotate in the margins a summary of how this connects to you. Write any comments or observations you feel appropriate to the text. You can also add your personal opinion.

“Guinea worm disease incapacitates victims for extended periods of time making them unable to work or grow enough food to feed their families or attend school.” –> My dad was sick for a while and couldn’t work. This was hard on our family.

Place a box around any term or phrase that emphasizes scientific language. These could be words you are not familiar with or will need to review later. Define those words in the margins.

“Guinea worm disease is set to become the second human disease in history, after smallpox, to be eradicated.” –> Eradicated = to put an end to, destroy

Like many skills, annotating takes practice! In the next chapter, you’ll be able to practice reading actively using the Aladdin article.