Following are the tasks you’ll complete in lieu of attending class Monday, August 30. Complete the following by the end of day (midnight) Monday.
The first topic for today is annotation. Many of you likely already take margin notes, underline, and add symbols — stars! smiley faces! hearts! question marks?— to mark important moments when you read. Many of you did this before knowing it was called “annotating”! No, just me?
Annotating is an important part of close and critical reading — you’ll mark places you’d like to circle back around to; you’ll mark things you think are funny or questionable; you’ll mark themes that come up over and over again. And so on.
Using annotation will be important for you in every single class that has assigned readings. Which is pretty much any class.
Without further ado…
Here are some resources and tasks that will go a bit deeper into annotation & will give you some practice.
- If you’ve never heard of annotating, you can start with this video (Note: The first comment is “my teacher is forcing me to do this and watch this.” I would annotate that comment with “hah!” Feel free to skip around, but it’s a good intro and only 7 minutes.).
- If you prefer to read about annotation, this text on annotating is there for you as an optional read. It’s an essay / project headed by a Baruch professor. It’s a bit more dense than YouTube but full of helpful tidbits.
- Read these two handouts: rhetorical reading and reading strategies.
After you’ve read/watched/learned about about annotation, you’ll engage with the practice by reading / watching these two language narratives:
- Read and annotate “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan ( Make a copy in Google Drive + add comments). Share your marked up copy with [email protected] so I know you’ve done it. For those interested, here’s a PDF of the original article in the 1990 Threepenny Review.
- Watch Safwat Saleem’s TEDTalk. You can’t annotate a video, but do take notes while watching & note the timestamp. I won’t check this, but I will expect you to be able to discuss the video in class on Wednesday. It’s worth watching, I promise.
That’s all, see you via Zoom on Wednesday, my friends.
