Informal Reading Response & Annotations:
While reading Susan Gilroy’s selection from “Interrogating Texts: 6 Reading Habits to Develop in Your First Year at Harvard” I started to think about my own approach to critical reading. When I annotate texts, I tend to focus on little issues, actively trying to find specific issues to focus on. An example of this would be focusing on a single sentence’s claim, arguing what the sentence says instead of how it fits into the essay as a whole. When deciding what to annotate I tend to limit myself to things I have discussed before in previous texts, in order to give me a guide on what to focus on. This might be focusing on a general thesis and drawing lines to the claims of a text. This generally gives me a lot more things to annotate about when reading a text than just focusing on local edits. On a more informal note, I like to have discussions with the texts that I read. Sometimes I agree with what a text says or disagree with what it says. When I disagree, it is evident in the following responses as you can see in the referenced annotations, because I get this heat that is very hard to stop when I write. What this means about my ability to “Interrogate texts” as Gilroy says, I have some thoughts. My ability to have a dialogue with a text allows me to gain information out of a text that I wouldn’t have gained if I just went through the text normally. One thing that particularly stood out to me in Gilroy’s selection was when she wrote, “Take the information apart, look at its parts, and then try to put it back together in language that is meaningful to you.” To me, this is what should be happening when everyone reads a text because, in order to truly understand a text, you should be able to explain it in your own way.
