The process of annotating work and learning how to truly engage with the text was a rough road over time for me. The original work I had done was to skim over the text and try to read through as quickly as possible in order to get it done. I would randomly highlight things in paragraphs and hope that they were useful for me to use and if not, I would read more thoroughly till I found something. This was not very effective whatsoever. The way of reading properly is really engaging with the text making comments and adding questions as you go along. MY process eventually changed to making an initial read with no comments or writing just to pick up the general idea of what I was reading. Then the next step I would use would be to reread the article and take notes and look at each sentence or paragraph and find the meaning behind it and see exactly what I could do with each thing in my own essay. This opened up more questions for what I could even write about and not just seeing what exactly the author was saying. When you do this and reread or annotate what is being said it opens up new discussions of things you did not see initially when reading through quickly. This evolution has helped me come up with all sorts of new directions for my writing and what I want to do within my own essay. Lastly it can make the article more interesting. It helps you get into the writers head and see exactly what they are thinking and its almost a challenge which is enjoyable.
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