Year 8 English Runner: Annotating Text

Text Annotation is the practice and the result of adding a note or gloss to a text, which may include highlights or underlining, comments, footnotes, tags, and links. [wikipedia source]

Annotating is any action that deliberately interacts with a piece of text to enhance the reader's understanding of the text. Sometimes called "close reading," annotating usually involves highlighting or underlining key pieces of text and making notes in the margins of the text. (source)

We often recommend that students read through their text before they start their school year so that when they are doing "close reading" it is easier to focus on the concepts rather than the storyline.

If you are studying a text, then consider keeping a Commonplace book.

This is a notebook where you record your thoughts, ideas, quotes and wisdom gained from reading your book.

It encourages you to create a fertile environment where you can allow your ideas and thoughts to percolate.

This student prefers to highlight her book and then write down the notes in a notepad. [source]

Some students like to both highlight and then annotate in the margins of a book. [source]

Using highlighters to add meaning to your annotations.

Instructional video suited to senior English or Literature students.

Mortimer J. Adler, Ph.D. wrote a famous essay called "How to Mark a Book" in The Saturday Review of Literature, July 6, 1941. Outlined in the essay was the famous 'Three bookowners" quote and also a list of techniques on how to mark or "own" a book. He argues that it is a means for engaging in a conversation with a text and recording your thinking. [source]

"There are all kinds of devices for marking a book intelligently and fruitfully. Here's the way I do it:

• Underlining (or highlighting): of major points, of important or forceful statements.
• Vertical lines at the margin: to emphasize a statement already underlined.
• Star, asterisk, or other doo-dad at the margin: to be used sparingly, to emphasize the ten or twenty most important statements in the book. (You may want to fold the bottom comer of each page on which you use such marks. It won't hurt the sturdy paper on which most modern books are printed, and you will be able take the book off the shelf at any time and, by opening it at the folded-corner page, refresh your recollection of the book.)
• Numbers in the margin: to indicate the sequence of points the author makes in developing a single argument.
• Numbers of other pages in the margin: to indicate where else in the book the author made points relevant to the point marked; to tie up the ideas in a book, which, though they may be separated by many pages, belong together.
• Circling or highlighting of key words or phrases.
• Writing in the margin, or at the top or bottom of the page, for the sake of: recording questions (and perhaps answers) which a passage raised in your mind; reducing a complicated discussion to a simple statement; recording the sequence of major points right through the books. I use the end-papers at the back of the book to make a personal index of the author's points in the order of their appearance.