Learning to Love Annotating

My Experiences

Although now I'm very fond of annotating a book or article, I had to teach myself to enjoy it. For a while, it was a lot of work that didn't seem to pay off in the end. This changed when I started my last couple years in high school and began to examine literature more thoroughly. As I learned to spot repetition, symbolism, allusion, and everything else that appears, it began to feel only natural to write down my observations, thoughts, and predictions for a book. I began to enjoy annotating, relishing in filling up a page with five different colors and cramming what notes I could into the margins and enjoying the feeling of understanding a book on a deeper level.

My Process

My annotating process is fairly simple: I buy a big pack of colored felt-tip pens and use them to color-code my thoughts. However, what I actually annotate varies from book to book. There are some constants, such as finding symbolism, noting the use of certain types of diction, and summarizing each chapter or section, but there are also large variations. When I was annotating The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I made sure to pay special attention to the changing relationship between Huck and Jim. Similarly, when reading A Doll's House I dedicated a good portion of my annotating efforts to the presence of gender roles in the book. Often I'll read the majority of a book before realizing that there's something important that I should be annotating, such as familial inheritance in Falsettos. In these cases I generally have to go back and re-read the book, but fortunately this gives me the chance to re-annotate and catch anything that I missed the first time, which is often a lot.