Annotations and informal writing serve as a crucial tool for demonstrating engagement with texts, refining ideas, and fostering critical thinking. Throughout my work, these elements reflect achievement of key writing outcomes by actively shaping my understanding and application of academic writing.

The learning outcome for active reading is outcome 3.

3) Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking.

The annotations and informal writing showcase the achievement of outcomes because they help create clarity, personalization, engagement, and communication. Annotations provide a guide or explanation, providing additional context for the reading content. They break down complex information and create questions to help comprehend the text. Informal writing helps the content feel accessible and less intimidating by making it more approachable and relatable. It ensures that the individuals who don’t have prior knowledge on the topic can connect and understand the material by incorporating a touch of personality and helps encourage the reader to engage with the content actively. Both annotations and informal writing help with engagement educationally and communicatively.

Annotations create questions and help make things clearer if you don’t completely understand by being able to put it into words that you will understand. In the photos above, some questions were made while reading the text, and statements were created to clarify what is being told or to connect another thing with the material. The annotations helped with the writing journals, one to find in-text citations and two to help figure out how I would write the journal to show my better understanding of the text. Highlighting and underlining things that seem of importance to me that help me to understand the text. Being able to critique the text in front of me by asking questions. Linking two authors ideas that are similar, where they are saying the same thing but are talk about it differently throughout their writing but being able to make those connections. Having in class discussions about the texts that we read was beneficial in helping me get a better understanding of the text if I wasn’t completely understanding what the author was trying to portray. Active reading helped decipher texts to get quotes for essays, learn how to think deeper about what the text really means which helped with my learning and how I think about a text now.