Whenever I read something, I make sure to employ techniques of active and critical reading, enabling me to build informal responses that demonstrate my understanding, thoughts, and criticisms of the text. As Susan Gilroy explains it, active and critical reading is “a way to have an ongoing conversation with yourself as you move through the text and to record what that encounter was like for you.” As I go through different readings, especially those that I will use to formulate an argument and write down in an essay, I make sure to record and make notes on how I interpret the text. I highlight the main ideas to ensure I know the subject of each portion of the text and markdown specific areas that relate to my argument, constantly asking myself the significance of what I am making note of. Gilroy supports this when she writes that “Analyzing adds an evaluative component to the summarizing process…What is the writer asserting? What am I being asked to believe or accept?” While annotating, I have found that questioning and analyzing the points that the author is making helps me build my argument as I am connecting their ideas with mine.
This process of mine can be seen in my annotations of Galen Strawson’s essay, “I am not a Story”. In some areas, I ask questions of the text and critique it. Though when I went through annotating the text a second time, I was able to build off my questions and criticisms, building them into my argument and explaining why Strawson made the points he made. This shift in my understanding of the text can be seen in my responses in my Blog Post #9 and #10. In Blog Post #9, I was informally responding to my thoughts about the text after only one round of annotations and did not agree with most of the points that Strawson was making. Though in Blog Post #10, I explained how my perspective had changed after undergoing a second round of revisions as I had gained a better understanding of the text. I started to comprehend and agree with Strawson’s point that life stories are inauthentic. My analysis of his thoughts enabled me to formulate an argument and thesis that I was able to support in my second paper discussing life stories. If I had not gone through and annotated Strawson’s essay so attentively, I would have had a weaker argument to formulate my essay as I would not have had a complete understanding of the text and where I stand in relation to it.
