Reading with Your Pen (aka Annotating is Fun!)

Perhaps you already enjoy grabbing a highlighter when your sit down to read or underlining your favorite lines of a book. Annotating (adding marks, notes, diagrams, etc, to comment or explain a text) is a helpful way to engage with what you’re reading, whether a story, poem, letter, or article. If you haven’t tried it yet, here are a few good reasons to jump in and a couple of tools to get you started! 

Good Reasons

• Reading with your pen, also known as annotating, helps you engage more actively with the text.  It’s harder for your mind to wander when you’re writing down a question you have about what is happening on page 84 or making a prediction about what you think Ifemelu will do next.
  
• Annotation provides notes from which you can pull when you enter into a discussion at your Book Club.  Easily thumb through the book to find your highlights, marks, or sticky notes and recall some of the important items that came up for you.
• Annotation provides a way for you to talk back to the text.  You pose questions, make exclamations, or simply highlight language you enjoy reading. This conversation with the text helps you make sense of what you are reading.
• All of the marks, notes, highlights, and quotes provide a way for you to see your own thinking.  You can go back to it just after reading, a week later, or years later and see how/what you were thinking as you engaged with the text.  What has changed?  What has stayed the same? It takes your reading to a new level of interest and depth, plus it’s just plain fun -- evidence of your reading, whether for play or work!
  

Tools

Guide to annotation marks:

• Keep it simple. Start with a few symbols that makes sense to you.  After some practice, you’ll find what works best for your reading and thinking -- symbols, colors, and abbreviations.
  
• Keep it consistent. Starting with a few symbols will help.  Maintain consistent marking -- if you want to write at the end of every chapter the main action of that chapter, do it every time.  If you decide to write your questions in the margins and highlight your favorite quotes in blue, follow through.  This allows you to find patterns of your own thinking as well as skip reinventing annotation styles each time you start. Use blue for fave quotes every time you read, whether an article or a book.  You’re set to annotate right when you pick up the reading!
  
• Keep it up! Once you establish a way of annotating, keep on marking and noting.  Do it with Americanah.  Practice it when you read a newspaper article or pick up a takeout menu.  You can do this with any text and the more you practice, the more you grow and change as a reader.
  
  

DIY Reading Kit: put 1 highlighter, 1 pen or pencil, sticky notes in a Ziploc bag, or rubber band them together. There you have it!  A portable reading kit.  Add heart or star stickers for extra fun & easy ways to mark favorite passages or important details.

Note: Skip making marks in library books. You don’t want fines added to your reading experience!  Try sticky notes for annotating in borrowed books; remove notes before you return books.