Above is a photo of my annotations on the piece “Conquering the Freshman Fear of Failure” by David L. Kirp. I used the method of highlighting and then making keynotes to the side. With this piece I made more text to text connections with other pieces I read which I thanked helped me a lot with comparing other pieces and using one writing piece to pull the others all together.
Above is a photo of my annotation of Carol Dwecks piece called “The power of believing that you can improve”. For this piece I used the same highlighting and making key notes but I used a different approach. For this I paraphrased the paragraphs more so that the reading would be more memorable for me by putting it in my own words.
I think that the process of annotating for me is what helped me with my paper the most. It made me not only pull apart things for my paper, but also gave me a better background on the things I was reading so I could explain it and have a strong text to text connection. I used several different methods, such as highlighting and taking notes within the pages, sticky notes, bullets on my computer, and pulling apart each page in a notebook. I found that all of these really helped me with different things, and depending on what my focus of the text was, depended on how I was going to annotate it. Just annotating in general and separating the main ideas from the evidence and claims were so helpful to not only my explanation of the text, but structurally for my paper.
