What is annotation?

Learning to read with your brain (instead of just your eyeballs!) is, perhaps, the most important skill you can acquire as a student, and the easiest way to read with your brain is to learn to write while you read!

The process of writing while you read has a fancy name: annotation. Essentially, to annotate an article is to take notes on it--really, seriously, directly on it, while you are reading it. If there is a magic bullet for improving your reading comprehension, this is it!

I use this handy mnemonic device to guide my own annotation efforts. Each of these describes a way that good readers respond to texts with their margin notes. I call it the "CLASP" method:

CLASP

Connect to prior knowledge ("This reminds me of...")

Look up unfamiliar words

Ask questions

Summarize

Predict

How to annotate online resources

In this class, we will use Perusall to annotate the required documents. But annotation is such a useful tool that you should use it in other courses as well.

Of course, I learned to annotate the "old-fashioned way"--using a pen or pencil to write in the margins of my book or paper copy. Annotating online resources requires more sophisticated tools. Here are three good options that you should keep in mind when you decide to start annotating online texts for other courses:

Option 1: Print up the article and then use the "old-fashioned" pen or pencil. If you need to show your annotations, you can simply photograph the pages and save the images to Google Drive.

Option 2: Many different online annotation tools exist. Just run a Google search to see the latest and greatest options. (These include, as of now, Diigo.com, hypothes.is, and Kami.com. But there are new ones popping up all the time!)

Option 3: Copy and paste the text of an article (along with its URL, so that you can find it later!) into a Google Doc and annotate it using the commenting function. Easy to store, and easy to share.