Throughout the course of English 110, I have learned to adapt to active reading and informal reading responses in all of my writing whether it was in this class or in another class. After reading Susan Gilroy’s excerpt, I definitely use most of the ideas that she brings up in her excerpt. One idea that she brings up is to read the text and rewrite it into your own words so that you understand the reading better. In all of my readings, I usually summarize with at least one sentence explaining what I read so that when I go back I can understand the paragraph better without having to read word from word. Starting English 110 I didn’t have much of active reading in my belt. I think the biggest idea that I liked the most was coding each comment into different topics such as understanding, having a question, challenging the author, relating the text to something, or a rhetorical move that the author may make in their text. In most of my texts, I usually have more understanding and question codes than all the others because they are easier to detect. I am trying to incorporate all of the codes in my active reading skills. With understanding, I usually explain what a word is or I define it. In question, I usually question the author so that I can think farther into the text. At the beginning of the semester, my active reading skills were not the greatest. When we were told to actively read a text my go to was to write a comment a couple of times during the reading and highlight all over the place. Now in my active reading journey I have may type of ways to tear apart the text. After reading the text we usually write an informal reading response that supplements the text and gives us a broader understanding of the text. I think informal reading responses help because not only are we tearing the text apart and looking deeper into the text but we are also connecting other authors with the same topic to the text whether it’s comparing or contrasting each author. This helps when it comes time to write an essay; it gives you a “mini-essay paragraph” which can help if you choose to connect those authors you wrote about. It also helps you start to think about the topic and how you will incorporate the texts into your essay. I have attached two informal readings and a photo of one of my annotated pages.

 

Informal reading response – technology 

Informal reading response – globalization