12b Read and annotate.
As you read a text for the first time, mark it up (if the medium allows you to do so) or take notes. Consider the text’s content, author, intended audience, and genre and design.
Go to the Thinking Visually exercise to analyze this image.
READING FOR CONTENT
- What do you find confusing or unclear about the text? Where can you look for explanations or more information? Do you need background information in order to understand fully?
- What key terms and ideas—or key patterns—do you see? What key images stick in your mind?
- What sources or other works does this text cite, refer to, or allude to?
- How does the content fit with what you already know?
- Which points do you agree with? Which do you disagree with? Why?
READING FOR AUTHOR/CREATOR AND AUDIENCE
- Do the authors or creators present themselves as you anticipated in your preview?
- For what audience was this text created? Are you part of its intended audience?
- What underlying assumptions can you identify in the text?
- Are the medium and genre appropriate for the topic, audience, and purpose?
READING FOR DESIGN, COMPOSITION, AND STYLE
- Is the design appropriate for the subject and genre?
- Does the composition serve a purpose—for instance, does the layout help you see what is more and less important in the text?
- Do words, images, sound, and other media work together well?
- How would you describe the style of the text? What contributes to this impression—word choice? references to research or popular culture? formatting? color? something else?
Sample annotation of an assigned text
After previewing the context, author, subject, and other aspects of the following article from the online magazine Good, a student assigned to write about the article annotated the text as shown.
Is the Internet Warping Our Brains? 
cord jefferson, senior editor, GOOD
New research from Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow
suggests that Google, your favorite search engine turned email host turned social network, might actually be making you less likely to absorb information. Sparrow’s study, “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips,” found that people who were confident they could use the internet to access some bit of information in the future were less likely to recall that information themselves.
However, they were more likely to recall how to go about accessing the information if necessary. Sparrow calls it “outsourcing data,” letting the internet take care of some stuff so we can save our brains for things that can’t be Googled, like parents’ birthdays and coworkers’ names.
Is this a bad thing? 
Not necessarily, says Sparrow. For instance, for years people in the educational community have known that rote learning—that is, forcing children to memorize facts and dates—is a poor way to educate.
If that’s the case, allowing computers to do some of the memorizing for us might be a way to focus more on the more philosophical aspects of learning.
“Perhaps 
those who teach in any context, be they college professors, doctors or business leaders, will become increasingly focused on imparting greater understanding of ideas and ways of thinking, and less focused on memorization,” Sparrow told Time.
Of course, while you might think that this research suggests people on the internet are using less of their brains than those not online, you’d be wrong. Back in 2008, the neuroscientist Gary Small discovered the difference in brain activity between a person reading a book and a person searching for information on Google. According to Small, the person searching the internet was using a lot more of their mind than the person simply reading a book.
Like Sparrow, Small says he’s not willing to say if the difference is bad or good, just that our minds react entirely differently when stimulated by the internet as opposed to other forms of media.
[Video: Gary Small discusses “Your Brain on Google” (2:43)] 
This sounds like a leading question to me—makes me think the author’s answer must be “yes.”
Look for more information on this psychologist and her research.
How did the research show this? What were the participants asked to do?
Haven’t we done this in other ways already—like taking notes so we don’t have to remember?
Interesting question! Not sure how I would answer.
Check out this link to see what the arguments are against “rote learning.”
This sounds right. But are we really going to become more philosophical if we don’t have to remember things? What if we just get more distracted by trivia?
Or perhaps not! This seems pretty optimistic.
Wow! Seems like it should be a good thing to use more of our brain. But what does it really mean?
So the researchers here aren’t ready to draw conclusions about what the differences mean for us. (Not that people would stop Googling if it turned out to be a bad thing.)
Watch a little of this to see if it might have important information to add.