My progress towards active reading, critical reading, and creating informal reading responses has grown substantially throughout the semester. I have learned that to be an active reader, I need to have a highlighter and pen handy so I can mark up the text. To be a critical reader, I need to think thoroughly and ask questions throughout the text to gain a better understanding of what I am reading. Writing informal responses, which was what we often did for homework, started off difficult because I was never sure where to start. Now, I feel like I can answer any question that is asked if you give me the text to read. Susan Gilroy speaks of how she “interrogates” the texts that she reads. I was able to relate to her interrogations because most of it was active reading that we have learned throughout this semester. My personal approach to annotating consists of highlighting the text that I find important, asking questions on things I believe need to be expanded on, connecting texts, and writing in the margins to understand things in my own way, then writing an informal response. Gilroy mentions “Mark up the margins of your text with words and phrases” which is what I happen to do. At this part of the excerpt I marked “U” because of our coding process, “U” means understand. I also used “R” to draw a relationship between myself and Gilroy. She also talks about how annotating is like having a conversation with yourself for a better understanding of the texts that you are reading. I strongly agree with this because I am not the strongest reader and often have to revisit the text a couple times before I fully understand what is going on. Therefore I was able to relate to her “interrogation” of texts and realize why i do things the way I do when it comes to annotating. Throughout the year we have been writing informal reading responses after we read texts in “Emerging” or other articles. These have been helpful to understanding the text because it allows us to see how the whole class views the articles and it helps to get a better sense to what you have been reading. These informal reading responses were very useful when you were stumped on something because usually someone posted how they saw things and everything added up.
Below is a link to my homework (informal reading responses):
Below is a link to the coding of Susan Gilroy’s “interrogation” of annotating:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aRiS3PFZ9nrhXmusqH8qjPntCfXDmTuFGJoxGboosxw/edit?usp=sharing
Below are pictures of my annotations of a few of the texts we have read:
