Hello students welcome to a quick guide to annotation
This video is meant to answer the question what is annotation
you've probably heard that term before because we use it here in the writing
center when we give you your dla packet we ask that you annotate the text that
comes along with your packet. So what does that mean?
We've got a definition here. Annotation is an active reading strategy
to help you stay engaged in the reading process
and retain information in the text. If you're like me you've probably
experienced a time when you've read a big long section of text
and then you get to the end of it and you look back and think what did i just
read? Your brain has checked out at some point
along the way your eyes are still decoding the word on the page but you're
not recalling any of the information you're not retaining it.
So annotation is one way that we can combat that, one way that we can work
against it and help you remember and commit this information to memory.
Annotations are made up of highlighting circling underlining and
adding notes and comments to the margins of your page as you're
reading. One question that we are asked a lot is
how do i annotate? We're going to give you some ideas
today of how to get started with annotation but it's important to note
that there's not one right or wrong way to complete
annotations. You can practice some of the strategies
that we're presenting here and then find what works for you and the
more you annotate the more you'll get a feel for what works for you
and what you like. So here are some ideas: you can
underline the main idea in each section highlight learning objectives or end of
chapter summary notes provided by the author
use some system of symbols or color coding that works for you.
For example i like to highlight unknown words in one color and the main idea in
another color and things that are interesting to me
and in another color. Other ideas include circling important
words like key vocabulary underlining main idea or key idea
drawing arrows to connect related items numbering steps in a process or items in
a list and again using symbols like question
marks exclamation points asterisks or make up your own to
identify important areas or things that you want
to refer back to later.
Here's an example of an annotated text and because everybody
is online learning this semester we've done
digital annotations as the example. This is something that's been created in
word and if you need some guidance on how to
complete digital annotations the writing center has you covered. We've got videos
for that too you can also annotate by hand if you
print out your readings you can just do all of this by circling on the actual
paper and writing your handwritten notes in the margins.
But this is an example of digital annotation.
You'll notice a few things the purpose for the reading has been identified here
there are margin notes for reaction wow that's really interesting
or things to clarify so this note here is clarifying what is the c
suite? Oh, they're talking about a ceo or a cfo really high level positions within
an organization. I've got unknown terms in this text highlighted
in yellow, that's just what works for me. You'll see questions are added next to
the turquoise highlighted section. So here's something that i thought was
not supported by the author. He makes this claim and i didn't feel he added
enough support, so i put a question in next to the item. And then i
identified the author's argument here, that was my purpose figure out what the
author's argument is and so when i thought that i identified it
i underlined it and highlighted it in pink to really draw my eye to it when i
went back to review my notes. So this is just an example of annotation,
again yours can look a little bit different but this gives you an idea of
what one page of text might look like when you're done with it.
Thank you so much for watching the video. We've got other
informational videos for you available on our canvas site we hope you'll
connect with us. You can find us here the writing and
reading success center canvas page. Thank you and be well.