These logically line up with what I’m going to do with the text after reading, as well as my purpose for reading it in the first place. So, two things we can annotate, naturally, are 1) our responses to a text, and 2) our paraphrases/summaries of bits of the text we had to wrestle with. Of course, I can't respond to something I don't understand, and so sometimes, especially when faced with a particularly befuddling sentence, paragraph, or section in the article, I ought to slow down, reread, and then annotate a brief summary or paraphrase of the challenging section in the margin. In that example, knowing that I want to dominate that post-reading task and that I simply need to get myself engaged with the probably unfamiliar and certainly unchosen content, I, as a student, ought to make annotations that begin to respond to the text. In that case, the purpose I set for my students’ reading is, as The Gallagher put it in a recent post’s comments section, to simply become smarter about the world, and the post-reading task is that they need to write a thoughtful 1+ page response.
#CLOSE READING AND ANNOTATING PROFESSIONAL#
Looking for an affordable, online professional development that elaborates on the concepts in this blog post? Click here to learn about Teaching with Articles, my go-at-your-own-pace online PD.Īs an example, let’s say I’m helping my students think through the task of purposefully annotating a Kelly Gallagher-esque article of the week.
Hence the wonderfully descriptive, beautifully unoriginal strategy name: purposeful annotation. When my students have a text they can write on, the idea, then, is to annotate in a way that supports our purpose for reading and the parameters of our post-reading task (keep in mind that the purpose and the task should line up).
#CLOSE READING AND ANNOTATING HOW TO#
We still need to teach kids, across the disciplines, how to wrestle with assigned texts, seeking, like Jacob, to get whatever blessing they have to bestow. So when I call close reading a buzzword or write the term’s obituary, I don’t want to give you the impression that we should let ourselves cynically dismiss the idea that reading is often hard, analytical - and yes, even “close” - work, especially when we're dealing with complex, college- or career-level texts assigned by a teacher.
If you’re new to the blog, though, keep in mind that while I do try not to take the educational establishment too terribly seriously (instead opting to occasionally poke fun at us), when it comes to helping students flourish in the long-term, I’m dead serious. I blame my error on allowing myself to get sucked into the unfortunate vortex that was the buzzwordification of close reading. It took me a year or more to realize that I was saying one buzzwordy thing to mean a lot of explicit, less confusing things that readers do when grappling with a text. If you look at my original close reading post, you'll see I was basically using the phrase “close reading” to refer to annotation.
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