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Welcome to Annotating a Source: Reading and Making Meaning with Research. This video will
help you explain the value of annotating sources for a research paper and apply annotation
strategies to markup and synthesize your researched sources.
Let's begin by establishing the value of annotation. First, it can help you summarize complicated
information presented within your scholarly sources. As you process the material, try
to make connections with your prior knowledge and experiences. How does the content fit
in with your existing understanding of the world? By forcing yourself to annotate, you
can also learn to better evaluate the arguments presented in your sources. Look for strong
support or faulty reasoning. Your own audience will be doing the same when they approach
the evidence you provide, so it's important to critically evaluate your own sources to
defend your ethos or credibility. Next, applying a highlighting strategy, for example, can
help you synthesize, or blend, the ideas within each source, by requiring you to connect the
information with your existing reasons that you may have generated while brainstorming
or giving you new content through which you can build even stronger claims and reasons.
Finally, a close reading with annotating can give you fodder, or ideas, for additional
research or refinement of your own writing. Let's take a look at how this might look in
a practical example.
Tyrel has recently been assigned a very open-ended informative paper requiring him to detail
a topic of his choice. Because he's an education major, he decides he wants to investigate
the current grading system to determine existing trends and potential alternatives.
After a careful search through multiple databases, Tyrel finds three scholarly sources that he
feels are reliable and valid and might help him prove his thesis, which claims that the
currently acceptable grading system is inadequate. Before he sits down to write his paper, though,
he wants to carefully read each article to get a better understanding of existing dialogues
surrounding grading. As he is grappling with the content, he chooses to annotate to help
him better digest the complex ideas. As mentioned, annotating can help you better
summarize the arguments and reasons presented in your researched sources. While there is
not just one right way to annotate sources, you can see here that Tyrel chose to use just
keywords to help him identify and summarize the main ideas of especially complex paragraphs.
He chose to markup his text with summary if he had to read the paragraph or sentence more
than twice before he understood the content or if he felt the idea was especially emphasized
or critical to his own argument. To connect the reading to his prior knowledge
and experiences, Tyrel commented on sections that made him think about what he already
imagined to be true or a relatable situation. You can see in the example from Guskey that
Tyrel found it difficult to accept the author's claim because it countered his own understanding
of how teachers perceive grades. In the Marzano and Heflebower text, Tyrel was reminded that
his own daughters' school used a modified version of the grading system being discussed
in the text. This helped him better visualize the author's claims and connect them with
his current mental models of report cards.
One of the most critical steps in your reading is evaluation. If you are unable to sift through
the claims, reasons, and evidence presented in your researched sources, you may find it
difficult to write intelligibly about your topic. Tyrel was frequently engaged with the
texts he had selected, noting good examples or evidence, questioning confusing or erroneous
content, and identifying potential logical fallacies. Notice that some of his annotations
are just a word or two while others are entire sentences. He also used his own shorthand
to speed up the process. The top example from Scherer, for example, has the notation "GP,"
which stands for "good point". When you annotate, feel free to use any style of annotation that
works for you, even including emoticons, symbols, and pictures.
After reading through and marking up the articles once, Tyrel decided that he needed to read
them again, this time with his revised main reasons in mind. Since he was writing about
current grading practices, he chose to focus on differentiating or categorizing students,
motivation, product-driven grades, process-driven grades, progress-driven grades, and standards-based
grades. Some of these reasons he had already noted in his brainstorm, but he also added
a few based on the initial read of his current sources. Notice Tyrel chose to create his
own key to help him better markup his sources to make organization and synthesis easier
when he was finally ready to write his paper.
Using his key, Tyrel was able to find supporting evidence from numerous sources for each of
his main reasons. Using multiple sources to defend a single claim can help you better
convince your audience that you are a knowledgeable, informed writer. Now that Tyrel has carefully
read and marked up his sources and has a much better grasp of the topic and is ready to
draft his paper. Fortunately, he will be able to do so not only quickly (because he's knowledgeable
in the subject), but also logically (because he also has a sound organizational structure
prepared).
One additional advantage of Tyrel's critical reading and annotating of his sources is that
he has learned even more terminology related to the field he is studying, which means not
only will he be able to expand his search for additional sources, if needed, but also
he can use those keywords to varying his own word choice more so that he isn't unnecessarily
repeated the same phrases throughout his composition.
Overall, Tyrel feels much more confident about his topic and source selection than he did
before studying the articles he collected. Annotation has helped him become a well-informed,
critical learner, which will translate well into his writing, enabling to better convince
his audience. Try these same kinds of annotation strategies to help bolster your own understanding
of your topic and to get a jump start on a more refined, more purposeful essay.