Learning Outcome 3: In the beginning of the year I had problems getting engaged with the text. I would miss key points in the text and end up not knowing what’s going on. In my last annotation, I annotated “La Bella Vita” by John Armstrong. I really understood what the author was talking about. I highlighted important parts for those areas to pop out. I could use those areas for quotes or areas I wanted to go back to and talk more about it. I would ask questions and try to find what the author was saying through those questions. They made me think deeper and challenged my beliefs sometimes allowing me to have a better “conversation” with the author in my paper. Susan Gilroy explains in “Interrogating texts: 6 reading habits to develop in your first year at Harvard”, she talks a lot about ways to interact with the text. I agree that making comments in the margins is important, but asking questions can lead you to so many different outcomes and ideas. These question can lead to the structure of your papers and allow you to have a strong paper that intertwines with your and the author’s beliefs. Gilroy says “Get in the habit of hearing yourself ask questions: What does this mean? Why is the writer drawing that conclusion? Why am I being asked to read this text? etc.” and these are the exact question that I tend to ask. I ask the questions when I am confused or want to challenge my thoughts or the author’s perspective. All these questions make you think and maybe will involve digging deeper to find your answer. Without the option of asking questions, my papers would be very vague and not to their full potential.
