As a younger man, I always had my ups and downs when it came to enjoying what I read. Sometimes I just didn’t feel like it and sometimes I didn’t like what I was reading. I was picky. Once I became 15 or 16 I began to see why reading was so nice. It was quiet and calm, when I read I could feel my heart rate increase and decrease with the plot of the story.  If you enjoy what you’re reading you can’t get enough of it. However, I didn’t understand why the story was so good and the author’s techniques which had enthralled me I was unaware of. Annotating has helped me to grasp the text better and I have been able to understand what the author is trying to say besides just the text itself. The emotion and work which is involved go a long way. Methods of annotation such as understanding and questioning have helped me to analyze a text and dig deeper. To help myself write papers in the future and take advantage of the examples other authors have provided. 

At the beginning of the year, I would demonstrate understanding to an extent but I showed room for improvement. I underlined many things but often didn’t make much comment on why it was important. I saw why it was important to the text, whether it was a claim or a means of conveying feelings to captivate the reader. That didn’t do much for me when It came to my first essay so I had to do more reading. A good example of this is in our first reading the limits of friendship.

As you can see I have some brief comments on the writing but I have underlined most of the page in multiple different colors. 

In my second most recent reading by Garnet Cadogan, I was very moved by his story. As a young boy, he grew up in Jamaica a black man. He came to America in hopes of higher education and even in Louisiana which was supposedly similar to life in the Caribbean was very different for Cadogan. He was harassed by police and he had to avoid women and white men who were out while he was walking. As the semester went on I began to be more thoughtful with my annotations writing much more on a page. Questioning the author’s story kept me interested in the reading and made me think ahead wondering what might happen. This led me to better understand the reading, gave me more comments, and led to better

writing in my papers.

I spent much more time annotating this page but it reduced the amount of time I had to spend looking for quotes and ideas while I was writing my final paper. The annotation methods of questioning and understanding work hand and hand, they have both helped me greatly this semester.