When I am annotating a paper or anything I am reading, I normally pick out the things that interest me or things I believe are important to remember. I will normally highlight or underline the sentences that I think I will need to use or remember. I will also write things in the margin that confuse me or that I have questions too. Sometimes I will re-write ideas in the paper that I need to understand or even just to write them in my own words so that I can grasp the idea better. In class when we would go through papers I would make sure to write down things that my teacher or peers said that I may need to use or look back at in the future. In papers that I have a hard time reading, I will write questions on the side or try to compare certain things. In one of the narratives that we read, I had the hardest time figuring out the main idea and what the paper was about. I had to keep re-reading it and when I finally figured out the two sides I had to make a list about what each side’s ideas were. Once I did that it made it easier for me to go back into the paper and pick out the main ideas. Some papers are much easier for me to annotate and pick out the main points but others take some time. I feel as though many papers leave me having many questions and I normally will write them on the side, in the margin.
We had many journals we had to write throughout this semester and many of them required us to take ideas from other articles or papers and answer questions about them. In the journal entry that I posted above, we had to read through Can Planet Earth Feed 10 Billion People by Charles C. Mann, and write about areas that we either agreed or disagreed with and why. We had to state our opinion with it and make sure to write the page number and paragraph so that people could easily locate the part you were talking about.
