How to mark a book To annotate means to add useful notes to a text. As you read, engage the text by asking questions, commenting on meaning, marking events and passages you want to revisit, and identifying and more deeply appreciating the craft of the author and the tools the author employs to achieve any number of desired effects.

Interact with the book- talk back to it (this is the text-to-self connection) Typical marks you can make: Question marks and questions – be a critical reader ? Exclamation marks – a great point, or I really agree, or I never thought of that! Stars, smiley faces and other emoticons Hi-light your favorite sections, interesting phrasing, provocative assertions, etc. Pictures and graphic organizers. The pictures may express your overall impression of a paragraph, page, or chapter. The graphic organizer may give you a handy way to sort the material in a way that makes sense to you. Underlining and Vertical bars: Use underlining and/or vertical bars for anything that strikes you as significant. Note in the margin your reason. Focus on the essential elements of literature (plot, conflict, setting, characterization, point of view and theme).

Typical writing that you’ll write: Comments – agreements, disagreements and lifelines: Lifelines are any line that you like, for whatever credible reason that you believe is worth remembering. Your personal experience: Reference something that happened to you that the text reminds you of, or that the text helps you to understand better. If you happen to keep your own personal journal or blog, you can cross-reference to those kinds of things. Random associations: Does the passage remind you of a song? Another book? Something in the news or from history? Like some of your dreams, your associations may carry more weight than you may realize at first. Write your associations down in the margin.

Learn what the book teaches. (This is the text-to-world connection.) Tracking nouns – important people, places, things, and ideas. Circle character names the first time you encounter each character; circle a place (or other aspect of the setting) whenever it seems important or relevant; and circle an object when it seems crucial to the story. “Re-circle” a character/setting/object whenever he/she/it returns to the text after a long absence.)

Write brief comments whenever possible to make these connections clear and to note any evolution or development. Keep track of important aspects of the setting and important objects in a similar manner. Do the same for ideas. Keep track of symbols, recurring images or motifs and trace their development. Shifts: Note shifts. Shifts in time, point of view, time, diction syntax and especially shifts in tone will signal what the author wants you to pay attention to and whether the author is being straight-forward with you or ironic. Remember that irony trumps everything because the meaning is really the opposite of what is being said.

Chapter summaries/titles: At the end of each chapter, either write a very brief summary of the plot as it occurred in that chapter or supply your own instructive title for each chapter of the book. ALSO, write two open-ended questions for each chapter. (Think of these questions as discussion-starters or short answer quiz questions that we could use in class.) When you’re thinking of topics for your questions, give importance to the characters—their goals and motivations and the important thoughts and actions that are essential to understanding them. (You will add to and modify these descriptions as the story unfolds.) Vocabulary: looking up words you don’t know, writing them down, and glancing over the list from time to time to increase your familiarity with them. Keep this list in your novel or start a notebook. EITHER jot down unfamiliar words and the page number where the word may be found OR within the text, mark words that are unfamiliar to you (or whose use strikes you as unusual or inventive). In either case, write in a definition or a synonym.

Pick up the author’s style. (This is the reading-to-writing connection What do you like about the writer’s style? If nothing occurs to you, consider the tone of the piece (is it humorous, passionate, ironic, etc.) Begin to wonder: how did the writer get the tone across? Look for patterns. Re-read a paragraph or two or three you really like. What begins to stand out to you? Consider syntax. This is the length of sentences and how the words within the sentences are arranged. You can circle or underline parts of speech with different colors to see how the author is putting his or her sentences together.

• Hi-light rhetorical devices with different colors or “box” them. ♣ Sound devices – alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, repetition, internal rhyme, ♣ Diction—word choices, connotation and denotation ♣ Imagery—sensory words ♣ Any other types of figurative language: simile, metaphor, personification, etc.

The amount of annotating is going to vary greatly from page to page and chapter to chapter, but it should continue throughout the whole text. You’re definitely NOT going to be marking all categories of things on all pages! You’re the one interacting with the text, so you’ll be deciding as you’re reading what things you should make note of.