Dear Reader,
Are you a community college student who wants to improve your reading skills? If yes, this article is for you!
Becoming a skillful reader takes your critical thinking skills to the next level, improves your reading comprehension, and positions you to perform well in all your courses.
Learning how to annotate is one key way to become a skillful reader. The purpose of annotating is to engage you, the reader, more with the text so that you’ll both understand it better as you read and remember it more clearly later. When you return to an annotated text later, you’ll be able to recall at least the basic gist of the text just from your annotations, without rereading. There are two aspects to annotation – summarizing and responding. In summarizing, you stick solely to understanding and paraphrasing what the author has said, and in responding, you raise questions about the text and express your own opinions and reactions.
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To annotate your text, you may or may not choose to pre-read it. Pre-reading could involve reading the title of the text to infer context clues about what the entire text could be about as well as skimming through it to get a quick idea of its overall message. Skimming a text may consist of reading subheads, reading the first and last paragraphs, and sampling a few paragraphs in between to get a sense of how the argument is structured.
How to Annotate a Text
In this article, I show you how to annotate a text by using an excerpt from my memoir, Destined: A Story of Resilience and Beating the Odds. The excerpt comes from the chapter in which I reflect on my experiences as a student in community college and describes how I enrolled in a public speaking class to face my fear of speaking in front of a group of people.
If you find this article helpful, share it with other community college students and invite them to subscribe to my newsletter.
Do you want to know more about how I went from a high-school dropout to a master’s degree? Grab a copy of my memoir, Destined: A Story of Resilience and Beating the Odds, set for release in February 2025. I would appreciate your review of it when it appears on Amazon!
Thank you for reading. Wishing you all the best.
Keep going!
Aminata Sy
Author of Destined: A Story of Resilience and Beating the Odds
