I have always viewed annotations as a helpful way to organize a source, but I realized through this writing assignment that I was never truly annotating to the fullest. I would usually highlight things I found important and occasionally would right in the margins. I never truly annotated before. For the Carol Dweck transcript, I challenged myself to not only highlight important information, but to explain why I highlighted it in the margins. This allowed me to go back later and understand why I highlighted it, and why it was important. For the Freshman Fear of Failing, I continued to underline and highlight, but I also asked questions and made connections between the piece and Dweck. This was helpful when it came to writing my essay because I had already done half the work of making the connections, and now all I had to do was expand on it. For the podcast, The Editor, I took notes on a lined sheet of paper. This was good because it allowed me to write as much as I wanted, but it would’ve been helpful if I had written approximate times with the notes so when I went back I would be able to find it easier. For the Little Seagull and They Say, I Say, I used sticky notes throughout the books. This was good because I could write more than what would fit in the margins, but the sticky notes cover up the text, so sometimes they get in the way when I go back to review the text. Overall I found that the highlighting and writing in the margins worked the best for me. I definitely think that by writing why it was important and by making connections between other texts, myself, and global issues, that it was easier to write the essay because I already had started some ideas.
Following Transcript w/Video:
For the TedTalk, I watched the entire video first. I then went back and played it through again, but while following along with the text. I found this to be very beneficial because I could easily write questions in the margins as they came up while watching. I also just find it easier to follow along with a text.
Underlining Article:
For this article I liked just taking notes in the margins. This is my favorite style of annotating because it is all in one place and easy to access; you don’t have to watch a video or podcast again to review it, you can just look at your notes and automatically link text with the annotations. This is the most common style that I personally use.
Pre-Writing Activities:
Here are my pre-writing activities.
Timeline:
Making the timeline was very beneficial. It gave me a visual representation of all the topics that I could write about. I made it so much easier to pick a topic and it was also fun to see my progression throughout the years.
Cluster:
This particular pre-writing activity wasn’t very helpful. It was fun to reflect on a particular place, but it didn’t help me very much with the actual writing process. I used bubbles to help me group topics and thoughts together. At first I thought it would be a topic to write about, but this activity made me realize that it wasn’t going to work out the way I originally thought it would.
