A Special Note on Taking Separate Notes on Readings Rather Than Marking Text
Dr. Harold William Halbert
Being able to annotate a text is a major skill needed to survive college, and in other documents for this course, you’ll read about how to effectively annotate a text either by physically writing on the printed text or using digital tools to mark an electronic copy. The third major option for annotating your texts is to take separate notes, but that comes with some challenges. Here are the expectations for people who choose to write out notes on a reading either by hand in a notebook or in a word processor.
- Write at least one substantial comment for each page read. The comment only needs to be a sentence, but writing three lines for a 20-page reading assignment is not enough.
- Include the page number from the text with each comment. Page numbers will allow you to locate the idea/quote that you want to use in a paper more quickly.
- Copying and pasting summaries from other sources or AI-generate summaries is forbidden. If you want to do so, you can append other summaries to your document, but without the individual comments per page with page numbers, you will not receive credit. The skill you are developing is summarizing on your own to draw out the main points, supporting points, symbolism, and methods of manipulating the reader to accept an idea as logical or to feel a specific way. Summarization is the first step towards deeper comprehension of a text, and it is not developed by simply copying the work of others or AI-generators. Equally important is that nobody believes that folks who are copying and pasting AI or other people’s summaries actually read the text, so please don’t put yourself in that position.