One of my favorite active reading strategies is to use in future classes is annotating texts and underlining or highlighting significant lines that I could use as evidence in my writing. Next to the underlining, I would summarize the main points of the paragraphs and would try to create connections in the margins. This helps me organize my thoughts and helps when drafting my papers and makes it easier to draw similarities between the texts. By commenting in the margins, it allows me to directly engages with the text, as Susan Gilroy states in her article “Interrogating Texts: 6 Reading Habits to Develop in Your First Year at Harvard”. She stated, “Annotating puts you actively and immediately in a ‘dialogue’ with an author and the issues and ideas you encounter in a written text.” This statement completely describes how to annotate my texts and how it is beneficial to ask questions of the author or just underlining the text. For example, when I annotated Jonah Lehrer’s article, “The Future of Science… is Art?”, I left comments relating to how art allows scientists to think of abstract ideas to advance their research and summarized his main ideas in the margins. Leaving these marginal comments have helped me easily draw personal connections from my life or to other texts that I could incorporate into my writing. Also, analyzing the texts by responding to questions that force us to reflect on how an author chose to develop their argument and how they supported their claims, helps to view the text in a broader sense.
Also, Gilroy stated, “Take the information apart, look at its parts, and then try to put it back together again in a language that is meaningful to you.” When I craft my essay, I like to create meaningful interpretations of the text and the quotes that I choose to include in my essay so that they support my overall argument without changing the original intent. For example, in my essay on the relationship between science and art, I used a quote from Lehrer which stated, “when the metaphysical equation is turned into a physical object, physicists can explore the meaning of the mathematics from a different perspective”. By giving the quote a new meaning, I was able to use this quote to serve my overall thesis and use it as strong evidence by creating my own connections.
