Active Reading

In analyzing the multiple texts throughout the year the most common theme for me was simply highlighting parts of the text I felt backed my essay. Whether I used direct quotations, or made inferences about the author’s point of view based on those highlighted sections, I found it extremely helpful in multiple ways. Firstly, this method forced me to read deeper into the meaning of what the author was saying, this consequently led to a deeper overall understanding of my own stance on the argument which in my opinion helped deepen the amount of detail in my essays, and made my arguments stronger. Secondly, highlighting specific areas gave me places to refer back to for inspiration for my argument when I felt stuck. This was detrimental for me because it allowed me to write these essays much easier than I would’ve without these areas of the text. Lastly, reading the text in such depth helped me to better understand if the argument the author is making actually makes sense. I found in one of the readings the argument didn’t necessarily make sense to me and what helped me to do that was going back through and reading what I had previously highlighted and asking myself questions about some of the areas of the text, and how they aligned with others.