Reading and annotating texts
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Reading is an important way to deepen your understanding of a topic and expand your perspective. It is your primary source of information for many college assignments.
- If you are assigned to write a literature review for a psychology or biology class, you will need to read and evaluate the research that has been published about a particular topic.
- If you are assigned to write a case study for a nursing class, you will read and analyze detailed information about a client’s health issues.
Don’t overlook your textbook, assigned readings, or recommended readings cited by your instructor in your syllabus or on the course Web site. You may find information relevant to your topic.
Tips for reading to explore a subject
- Read with an open, curious, even skeptical mind to understand written and visual texts.
- Preview a text before you read it to understand its basic features, purpose, and structure.
- Try to obtain an aerial view of a subject to gain an understanding of the conversation around it. What are the major themes, arguments, and evidence under discussion?
- A few sources may help: A newspaper or Web site article can get you started thinking about a topic. Or a magazine article (such as one from Scientific American or the Economist) can give you a broad understanding and help you think through a topic.
- As you become experienced in your discipline, you will rely on the current state of knowledge as reflected in scholarly journal articles and current books.
Annotating a text, written or visual, encourages you to read actively—to highlight key concepts, to note contradictions in an argument, or to raise questions for further research and investigation.
Tips for annotating written or visual (multimodal) texts
- Underline or highlight the text’s thesis, central idea, or message.
- Note
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what surprises or intrigues you about the text.
- Note possible contradictions in an argument.
- Respond to the text with questions and observations.
Guidelines for actively reading a written text
Guidelines for actively reading an image or a multimodal text
Annotated multimodal text (Equal Exchange advertisement)
Annotated multimodal text (McDonald’s advertisement)
Related topic:
Reading and writing critically