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All right, so we've reached a milestone in our discussion of critical reading thus far. But we've got a lot of work to do still within the same territory of critical reading. Now, we're going to move into a new area within that territory. This area is called a marking texts, marking texts. So what does that mean to mark a text? Well, if you look at the books of active critical readers, you will see pages filled with underlined passages, marginal comments, questions, reactions, things like that, that essentially constitute a record of engagement with the text of the critical readers interactive engagement with the text. So because the critical reader has recognized the close link between reading and writing, they rarely read without a pencil in hand, or whatever tool they choose to mark these texts with, or set of tools. They underline the readings thesis statement, they may highlight it, signal its importance or presence somehow. And they're bound to do the same thing or at least something similar to any other important components or passages that they find in their reading. As the question the material they're reading, they annotate the text and write down the answers to the questions they ask, so that when they return to the material later, they can recall the author's purpose and findings. Or remember how they responded to the author's ideas, and very importantly, locate the information they want to use or might want to use in their papers. The two most common ways of marking texts are highlighting and annotating. Highlighting typically involves underlining circling, bracketing, or color coding passages. While annotating typically involves writing comments or questions in the margin or at the end of the text. So at this point, I'd like you to consider that what's been said so far, in the last couple of minutes is just an introduction to marketing texts. But to really understand some of these moves in greater detail, we should now look at them in particular. So let's do exactly that. And we'll start with highlighting texts. So highlighting what does that involve in this kind of context? Well, it involves underlining color coding, or in some other way, marking important passages in a reading. When we highlight something we increase its salience. salience is a kind of specific visibility. When you give something salience or increase something's salience, you make it stand out more in relation to the things that surround it. So if you've highlighted a passage, you've increased its visibility, and it now stands out in a way that it didn't before. Such new measurements of salience also signal new measurements of importance. A word of caution here though,
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you really should be careful about how much salience you bring into your practice, you can definitely highlight too much. And on the other end of that spectrum, you can highlight too little, most students tend to do one or the other. Some never make a mark in their books. Perhaps they were trained in high school, not to markup readings, or maybe they are concerned about the resale value of their books. Some think it's kind of SEC religious. And maybe for some books, it definitely is. Whatever the reason, these students rarely if ever highlight material they read. Other students highlight too many passages in a reading. Practically every sentence is underlined, and almost every paragraph is shaded yellow or pink. See, when you highlight too much, you kind of flood the market of the text, you introduce too much product and it decreases the value and the quality of the good of salience. Sort of an extreme example, but if you highlight too much, you then have to go back and add another layer of salience on top of your enormous amount of highlighting, and then it becomes time consuming a laborious task that you're constantly thinking about when reading a text. This introduces a distraction, a distraction from your engagement or a distance between your engagement as a critical reader with the text and with what a critical reader is. You have to be selective in what you highlight. So how do we find the right balance? Strike that sweet spot, right, we mark up a reading in order to understand it more clearly, and to identify important passages that we can return to later when we write our papers and other things of our own. In order to highlight a reading effectively, you need to develop your own marking system, which is the kind of code that helps you locate certain types of information in a text. You'll find that good writers usually develop unique ways of highlighting readings, they underline certain kinds of passages, place brackets around specific types of information, and circle other parts of the text to so that later, when they return to the reading to write their paper, they can easily find the information that they need. What follows now are some suggestions about what to mark in a text. So first, you should mark an author's thesis and their primary assertions as well as any supporting evidence. Second, mark the names of authors and dates of studies, locations of research projects, and other important facts that find mentioned in the text. Third, mark key passages that you might want to reread, or quotes or paraphrase later as you write your paper. And finally, Mark words or terms that you don't know. So you can look up their definitions. Now, for this last point, you should definitely be doing that as you're reading through the text for the first time. That way, you're not only familiarizing yourself with specialized content, you're further innovating and furnishing your understanding of the text itself, what it's about and probably the domain in which it resides. When you do that, you increase your fluency in being able to read the text, but also your fluency of being a critical reader as well as what conversation what larger conversation that the text may join to, which in turn can facilitate your entry into that conversation. So establish your own way of highlighting a text, circle author's names, bracket dates, use a yellow highlighting pen or whatever color you choose to mark any passages you may want to quote, and maybe a different color to indicate questionable statements or whatever variations make sense to you. In any case, once you establish your own highlighting system, writing from readings will become much easier for you. At this point, we've discussed one form of marking a text. Now let's look at another. And this is sort of a categorical form that we're going to refer to as annotating texts. And there are a number of methods within this one form. So let's first take an overview of this categorical form of creating annotations.
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Annotation is a kind of multi tool that you should also include in your marking text toolbox included with highlighting. So while you are highlighting a reading, you should also annotate it that is write out your responses and questions, observations or conclusions. Generally, there are two types of annotations that you will use got marginal and end comments. So marginal annotations and end comment annotations. Marginal annotations are notes that you make to yourself in the top, bottom or side margins of the page. And and annotations are in notes. It's much easier to say in notes, so and annotations and notes, whatever you prefer. I'll just go with end notes. These are notes that you make at guess where the end of the text. So now let's look at marginal annotations in greater detail. Marginal annotations are typically short, and in many cases may make sense only to the person who wrote them. Generally, they can be divided into content notes, organization notes, connection, notes, questions, and responses. So there's a few different divisions of marginal annotation. Since we need to look at each of these divisions. We'll just start at the beginning of the list with content notes. So content notes, they typically identify the meaning or purpose of the marked passage. A content note typically identifies the meaning or purpose of the marked passage. For example, after bracketing and author's first argument that eliminating a particular government program may have negative consequences on the poor. For instance, you may write in the margin argument one consequences for poor. Just a quick few words summary of that argument, when you review of reading to find material you want to use in your paper. Content notes help you easily locate what you need, which can be of particular importance, if you are, say, completing a research project involving multiple readings. So that was content notes. And now we come to organization nodes. Organization notes are a kind of marginal annotation that helps us identify the major sections of a source text. So organization nodes help us identify the major sections of a source text. And you may have guessed this because what constitutes organization essentially comes down to the kinds of sections in a text or really anything. So how do these organization notes work? Well, for example, after underlining an articles thesis, you may write a thesis and the margin in order to find it more easily later. Than brackets say the first few paragraphs or whatever constitutes the introduction and write introduction. In the margin, you might draw a line down the margin beside the next few paragraphs and write first argument in the margin, then highlight the next section and write refutation of first argument if that's something that's there. Organization notes help you understand how the author has structured the piece, and may help you locate particular sections of the text that you would like to review. So that was organization notes, it's a fairly straightforward kind of marginal annotation. Now let's look at connection notes. Connection notes, identify the links you see, between an author's ideas and those offered by other writers, or between ideas and author develops in different sections of a reading. For example, if you find an idea in one reading, and it echoes with an idea and another reading, you might write in the margins, something like this idea echoes so and so's argument.
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Or perhaps we have a connection note that says, illustrates first point, perhaps in reference to some previous part of the same paper, or perhaps somewhere else, like in an external work by either the same author or another author, or even the first point of some concept that's already outlined, that pre exists. So that we can identify the components guiding that concept, or its guiding principles, perhaps us they manifest themselves or are just present in whatever way within some reading. And this is what makes connection notes so powerful. We can find anchor points between one work and another. And not only between different works, but within the same work too. For example, if we link one section to another section within the same article, we start to reveal a meaningful network within that article. And if you can use language to articulate along those lines of connection, then guess what you're writing. And I'm telling you, it feels good takes the burden some feeling away from reading, especially if you're having to do that reading for writing about it later, like in a comp class, where you're given these assignments that ask you to produce essays, usually about a set of texts, or some key word concepts, or, or both. So now that I've talked this off, I can't just leave things like this. I can't leave things in a vague way. So let me give you some specific strategies for making connection notes. First, as you read an article, you should note how the author's ideas confirm or refute ideas developed by other writers. This asks that you read broadly Of course, so you may not be able to do this on a first read. Unless you're already familiar with the subject in question. Note the connections in the margin of the essay you are reading. In case you want to examine the link more closely later. Leave yourself a trail you can retrace, do not rely on your memory alone. You can get away with that to some extent. But if it's an in depth project, and you really want to build your networks within these articles, then leave traces. You know your future self will thank you. If you make these annotations that make your writing experience, more fun. First of all, more fun but easier, more fun. would certainly less frustrating. So what about a case where we're handling multiple sources? Well, if you're reading multiple sources on the same topic distinctions between the text can very quickly bore, you may have a difficult time remembering who wrote what if you don't have good connection notes. Also use connection notes to trace the development of each writer's thesis. note in the margin of the reading the link between the various ideas, arguments or findings the writer offers, and how those relate to their thesis. Okay, so we've gone through content notes, we've gone through organization notes, we've gone through connection notes, what do we have left? We still need to cover questions and response notes. So let's start with questions. Questions are great because they can serve several purposes. First, they can identify passages you find confusing. In a question, try to capture precisely what you find confusing about that passage, especially if you know that reading will be discussed in class. Second, questions can help you identify in a reading the material you might want to dispute. Try to capture and a critical question or two why you disagree with what the author has written. On a similar note questions can also help you reveal possible counter arguments to things that you do believe. And finally, questions can identify where the author has failed to consider important information or arguments. These are typically what about questions like What about the theory proposed by Smith? What about people who can't afford daycare? Your goal is to use the question to indicate possible limitations to an author's ideas or arguments. So that wraps up questions what's left response notes? So what does the response note do? Well, think of it more of like a reaction notes. Response notes,
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record your reactions to what you read. And these notes may indicate which ideas you accept which ones you reject, and which ones you doubt. They can range from a simple yes, or ha to more elaborate and detailed reactions that allow you to explore your response. To Be careful about using response notes, though, actually, you should use them responsibly Funny enough, because if you use these too early on, or if you've rely on them too much, they can skew your readings of texts, and especially if you're reading a text for the first time. Or if you know that the text contains ideas or beliefs that typically run counter to your own. Too much reaction overwhelms the other possibilities of reading the text. And this really takes away from your ability to critically read it. And so too much reaction really narrows your field of vision. It overwhelms your visual field with this narrow window. And what that does is restrict what you're able to see in the text, how you're able to respond to it. You wouldn't want to instill in your reading self a tendency to block out your objective critical eye and losing that helps neither your reading nor your writing. So remember, it's perfectly fine to use response notes as one of your annotation techniques. Just do so responsibly.
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