Annotating text, is something I dislike. I don’t really like annotating because I feel like it takes too much time, instead of just reading the paper. I will say that from being made to annotate and take pictures that I did, I found that after annotating the text I retained more of what I read and overall easier to go back and write papers based on a paper. Normally when I would annotate text I would struggle with writing down my thoughts. This semester I worked really hard on writing down my thoughts when I read the paper. When marking up the text I would mark up important names, dates, information, exciting details. I would only really mark up key words in the sentence so when skimming over the paper later it was easier to find what I was looking for. When I really agreed or disagreed when reading I would write down my opinion. Also when reading if I had any questions I would write them down. I honestly just wrote down whatever came to mind, there wasn’t really a madness to my method. Also another technique that I found useful was making connections because I felt that when we would get out prompts it included a personal anecdote, and connecting helped me write it easier. When annotating I found it to be easier to annotate papers that were interesting and meaningful over educational materials. Also when highlighting if I came across and idea that was on the larger side I would put brackets around it instead of going back and forth with the highlighter.
