This learning outcome is focused on annotation.
I’d like to think of my annotation approach like a live reaction. I am the audience and the author is the performer on stage. I react to the work he puts up and record it on the piece of paper containing his work. If it’s a difficult reading or a performance that’s hard to follow, I dumb it down to myself. I think of the basic concept the author is trying to communicate and then I try to put myself in their shoes. How do they perceive this concept that they’re trying to communicate? I ask myself this question as I’m following the performance and when something catches my mind that prompts me to think of an idea, I mark it up. The main areas I focus on when trying to generate these ideas are drawing relationships, making connections, asking questions, connecting text-to-self, text-to-text and text-to-world, and considering the pathos, ethos, or logos of a text. I only ever see myself challenging the author if I don’t agree with them and I’ve honestly never really looked up any words I don’t know. If I don’t know the meaning of a word, I use the words around it to try to think of a meaning in my head. Annotating helps with making connections that weren’t even perceived to exist in the first place. It brings out points and makes you connect them even though you couldn’t imagine the two points being connected. This is because recording reactions that conceive ideas will prevent those ideas from being forgotten. Once everything is recorded, it’s simply a game of connecting the dots. This thought process that comes with annotation can be useful in other subject areas. While it may not be the actual annotation that is applied, the thought process of recording a reaction that leads to an idea numerous times can bring out connections within the ideas. The mind forgets, but through recording what is thought, the ideas become visual. While my annotations aren’t the greatest detail wise, they still helped me connect ideas to each other as my thoughts were laid out right in front of me. Here are my examples:
