Teaching close reading/annotation

[lisabees]

Dd14 is finishing up 8th grade. She has read a lot and we have discussed a lot. She has come a long way, but she has a problem with annotating in any way. I know this is a skill that is practiced heavily these days. I have always done it naturally. My books are filled with notes.

 

Is there something I can do to spend these final weeks going through the process systematically...as an introduction? Or is this a skill that I am overrating? My DSD just returned to public school and she has to annotate everything and gets graded on it.

[katilac]

We really enjoyed The Art of Reading from The Great Courses; I think it is a great introduction to close reading.

 

Is she returning to school? If not, I don't think it matters how she extracts information. None of us have ever annotated books; we take notes instead. It hasn't been a problem as they transitioned to college classes. 

 

Detailed notes, suitable for supporting literary analysis or a research paper, only happens around here once they actually have a specific assignment (and also a specific topic for that assignment). 

[lisabees]

Thanks Katilac. That's comforting to know. She may return to school; we are taking it year by year Her freshman year will definitely be at home.

 

She is currently reading How to Read Like a Professor and finishing up Great Courses Analysis and Critique. They are good complements to each other and she is really enjoying both. I have been waiting for The Art of Reading to go on sale; she prefers videos.

 

Thanks again!

[winterbaby]

I had some great fictional literature seriously ruined for me at that age by being required to underline this, circle that, highlight the other (in multiple colors!) to show that I recognized various literary devices and so forth. Rather than simply read, discuss, and appreciate it. Absolutely criminal. If she goes into a school situation where they require such a highly specific system of annotations she will have to learn it from them as teachers who are into that kind of thing tend to want it done THEIR way. On the other hand, in reading textbooks and serious non-fiction it's a good idea to know how to approach it systematically. Two classic systems that don't require a lot of specific marking are survey-question-read-recite-review https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R and preview-question-read-summarize-test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Study_skills#Reading_and_listening They're very similar - basically you use headers, diagrams, etc. to get an overview before you plunge into reading and then after you've read you go back over how the details fit into the overview.

 

I'm not a big fan of writing in books. It decreases their reuse value and tends to be abbreviated and ambiguous. If/when one advances to very technical work in college or grad/professional school there can be a role for judiciously marking key points in dense text, but it doesn't substitute for note-taking. And habitual dependence on it can be a liability when you start running into books you're not free to mark up because of their age/value or the fact that they don't belong to you.

[katilac]

She is currently reading How to Read Like a Professor and finishing up Great Courses Analysis and Critique. 

 

Oh, we really liked Analysis and Critique as well! 

[lisabees]

Oh, we really liked Analysis and Critique as well! 

 

Just bought Art of Reading with the Memorial Day sale.  DD and I love Great Courses.  :)