Reading to Learn
Annotation and Note Taking

If you take a casual look at your students' texts during class, you'll often see that very few mark their books or take notes while reading. A few will enthusiastically use a yellow highlighter to mark entire pages of text.

More seasoned readers, however, write while they read (or soon after reading). Not only do they understand what they read better, but, when they return to a text after some time to write about it, they have a record of their earlier engagement with a text. By contrast, when many of our students return to a text weeks afterwards to write about it, they have little record of having read it.

Quite often, a weak paper reflects not "bad" writing in itself, but a weak understanding of the reading assigned for a course.

Reading as a Process

Reading to Learn exercises seek to adress this problem by asking students to write about their reading long before they write a paper or an exam. If students begin to see reading as a process, they will slow down, ask questions, define terms, summarize difficult passages, and highlight important ideas more sparingly. If students understand what they read earlier in the course, they can also build on earlier writing about texts when they sit down to write a final paper or project.

The following exercises were developed to help students both inside and outside of class read more actively, using writing early in the semester as a way to increase understanding of course materials.