“Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking.”
I know I struggle with active reading and note-taking of important and relevant information. I tend to take too many notes, which is something I’m trying to improve in other classes. While I didn’t find the Brief Guide to Annotations particularly helpful, it did give me inspiration for better note-taking. I love color-coding things if you couldn’t tell from my Barclay paragraphs from the previous learning outcome. I think having a key to better dissecting texts is going to be my strong suit, finding important bits while still acknowledging the things that catch my attention- relevant or not.
Even though I really enjoyed reading and listening to DFW’s This is Water speech my annotations of it are messy, unorganized, and a little off-topic (as shown above). Even though my annotations are… Subpar? I know that I was actively engaged with this text. I was listening to the speech at the same time I was reading it, and that felt so much more interactive than what I’m used to. I have to watch TV with subtitles or else I can’t pay attention to the dialogue and I miss things. I think seeing that clearly translated to reading is an interesting and possibly essential discovery for me and my future as a reader with ADHD.
For Ross Gay’s piece, I think I did a more effective job of both actively reading and taking annotations that are relevant to the topic at hand. Having multiple colors at my disposal was incredibly helpful for organizing my thoughts. While I do wish I had more room in the margins to write, I think having that limited space forces me to condense my thoughts. Nothing’s stopping me from continuing or elaborating on another sheet of paper.
