Learning outcome #3 explains my approach to active and critical reading. My approach is best seen in the annotation of “The future of science… is art?” By Jonah Lehrer. As you can see in the pictured I actively engage the text to make sure that I truly understand the context. Susan Gilroy explains in “Interrogating texts: 6 reading habits to develop in your first year at Harvard” that when you annotate a document you should margins of your text with words and phrases as well as “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.” This is the exact method I implore. When annotating a document, I react when I’m confused, writing questions that I hope are answered later on, or commenting on sentences that are just plain confusing. I look up and explain any sayings, definitions, or words that I do not understand. I find that by engaging the text on this level it allows me to understand it on a more personalized level, so that when I go back through it I can read it through my own way of thinking and understand it better. I typically look for things that I believe will be important or are interesting to me when I mark up the paper. However, it isn’t uncommon for me to mark up my frustrations with something that is said that I either disagree with or just doesn’t make any sense to the rest of the essay.
