Active, critical reading is essential to the writing process. When I approach active reading I like to read through the material whether I’m reading an article, essay, or short segment. I underline quotes that I think will be useful as evidence for my own writing or quotes that I just find interesting on a personal level. I am usually able to make self-to-text connections with those. For example, I underlined a quote from Julie Beck’s article, “Life’s Stories”, that says “…older adults had more thematic coherence, and told more stories about stability, while young adults tended to tell more stories about change.” I found this to be interesting and I was able to connect to my own life because I felt that statement to be true to the conversations I’ve engaged throughout my own life. I also make notes in the margins to summarize a short piece of what I read, to make sense of certain ideas and concepts, and to write any questions that I have, whether that means challenging the author or just because I simply don’t understand that idea. In my annotations from Beck’s article, I have demonstrated how I underline concepts and sentences that stand out to me or grab my attention. I also make notes on most of those underlined sentences. One example from Beck’s article that was noteworthy to me was that “[storytelling] is a way of making sense of the world around us” (Beck). I felt that this supported my own argument and I could potentially use it to support a claim I would make. I also use quotes like these to make sense of what the author is saying and that can be useful in my informal reading responses. The informal responses are helpful for breaking down what the author is trying to say.

As Susan Gilroy says in her selection “Interrogating Texts: 6 Reading Habits to Develop in Your First Year at Harvard”, “Annotating puts you actively and immediately in a ‘dialogue’ with an author and the issues and ideas you encounter in a written text.” I agreed with this because I’m automatically more engaged with the text when I’m annotating than I would be if I were just reading it to read. The way that I approach this style of reading means that I “interrogate” the text, as Gilroy puts it, by asking questions, summarizing text, and outlining. In the annotations that I’ve included from Julie Beck’s article, I underlined several sentences that I was later able to use in my own essay as evidence. Asking questions are reminders to yourself that there is still more to uncover within the text. Summarizing and outlining gives you a general idea of what your argument may look like when it’s time for you to write, then you can analyze and synthesize those quotes you’ve pulled to develop your ideas. These elements of active reading are very helpful for building your own ideas and using these other sources to help support or challenge what you have to say in order to create an effective essay.