I’ve never been the best at annotating because I sometimes find it hard to write my thoughts down instead of keeping them in my head. When I do annotate, I try to focus on important parts of the text, but that can be hard. On paragraph two in The End of Food I underlined the sentence “They had been living mostly on ramen, corn dogs, and Costco frozen quesadillas….” (Widdecombe 1). I did this because it really highlights how the characters are living. For example, on page three I wrote “different view, no longer poor”. This really makes it easy to find comparisons when I’m looking back at the text. This is important to compare to the character’s lifestyle in the end. I also like to highlight settings of pieces of writings because it brings me into the piece, as well as making me understand the character better. I also write things on the edge of the paper like “interesting”. I did this on page six. This brings my attention so later I can focus on it. Susan Gilroy says, “markup the margins of the text with words and phrases: the 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…” (Gilroy). This is exactly what I strive to do when annotating. I be sure to pick out the important things and things I have questions about to be sure I’m engaging with the text.
