Outcome 3 (Active Reading) – Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking.

Overall my annotations at the beginning of the semester were not that good at all. I would always focus on just highlighting main points and explaining them in my own words. I wouldn’t use any special techniques to try and help me for future essays, I would just annotate to get it out of the way. But towards the end of the semester I was able to use the Guide to annotations and was effective with them and found quotes that I could use in later essays to I would be prepared. I may not still be the best at annotations but I have improved greatly since the beginning of the semester.

This image from the first essay we read, and it shows how bad I was at annotations. I just would frame a paragraph and just explain it in a few words. This method of annotating was not effective at all since when I gets to the time to write my essay I would have no solid information or quotes that I could use.

Once I was able to get decent at annotating it made it a lot easier to find helpful quotes for my essays. In this next image it shows what my annotations looked like towards the end of the semester. I was able to use the brief guide to annotating a lot better, I used the understanding aspect and extending aspect a lot in my annotations.

In this essay I was able to use the Understanding aspect of annotations and used that to help understand what I just underlined above, in the image where a put a box around the words “difficult situation” and in that sentence I used the Understanding idea and in that sentence those words meant to help people with different feeling as you and see if you can actually help them. I used the extending aspect to show what the underlined portion next step was, it was feel peoples pain that you can’t relate to.

Overall I think my annotations in some areas a still a little poor, but since the beginning of the semester I have improved them enough that I can get solid information that I can use in my future essays.