Learning Outcome 3
Active reading is one of the most useful tools one can use in order to truly understand and learn from a piece of writing. As Susan Gilroy a writer from Harvard Library, says in her text “Interrogating texts: 6 Reading Habits to Develop in Your First Year at Harvard,” “Annotating puts you actively and immediately in a ‘dialogue’ with an author and the issues and ideas you encounter in a written text.” Take for example for English 110, our third learning outcome for is to “Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking.” Creating this “dialogue” with the author by creating comments on the topic, will help the reader become more engaged with the text and allow for better learning and understanding to come from the reading. Also Susan Gilroy mentions in her text was in order to actively read a text you must “mark up the margins of your text with words and phrases: ideas that occur to you, notes about things that seem important to you, reminders of how issues in a text may connect with class discussion or course themes” and questions that may come to mind while reading. Take for example in my annotations of “The future of Science…Is Art?” by Jonah Lehrer I marked up the text as much as I could using highlighter, different colors and comments such as “Art is powerful, Science is powerful, art and science put together is immeasurable”(p. 3) or “Scientists are factual and to the point, they should be more like artists and think outside the box” (p. 4). Also in my annotations I asked questions that came to mind while reading such as “Wouldn’t it make sense to learn about the smaller stuff first then discover more about the broader topics as life goes on?” (p. 3). I’ve learned overtime to comment on anything that catches my eye, is confusing, or that I could use as a quote in an essay. Lastly, after annotating, I created a personal reading response to write about my opinions on the reading and summarize what happened in the text. In this reading response, I also found unfamiliar words that were in the text and defined them so that when I looked back at the text it would make more sense. Then when we went over Lehrer’s article in class, we created a group reading response in which we discussed Lehrer’s views and the evidence he used to support his claim. Personally, annotating and active reading skills were hard for me to develop at first. I struggled with questioning an authors work or even forming my thoughts about a text into comments. After doing it multiple times in English 110, I’ve learned how to respond to texts in a way that helps me better understand it and learn more from a text than I ever would have before.
Works Cited
Gilroy, Susan. “Interrogating Texts: 6 Reading Habits to Develop in Your First Year at Harvard.” Harvard Library: Research Guides, 1980.
