Over the course of the semester my approach to active reading has changed tremendously. At first I saw it as just connecting my ideas to what I was reading. Actually, before I learned about the active reading strategies, critical reading, and informal reading all I did was connect to the passages I read. Connecting to passages though is a form of active,critical reading. There are five categories when it comes to active, critical reading. These five categories are: understand, ask questions, draw relationships, challenge, and rhetorical. I mainly fall into the understanding and drawing relationships categories.

Although, over the course of the semester I’ve been more active in the categories: ask questions and challenging. I like to draw relationships to what I read because that way I feel more connected to what I am reading. I usually find lots of text to self connections. As well as understanding what I’m reading, I like to restate what I read in my own words so I don’t have to reread when I look back and more than before I am commenting on confusing ideas/examples and challenging what is written to what could be said instead.

My chosen evidence is from the article “The Moral Bucket List” by David Brooks. Within this article, my annotations are in the margins along side a letter that represents one of the active, critical reading categories. My annotations compare to Susan Gilroy’s idea of  “integrating” a text. Some examples in my article and Susan’s excerpt are as followed: in the passage labeled The Conscious Leap, it reminded me about Gilbert and his idea on happiness, because people are taking the leap to go beyond their fears and reasoning. In class we talked about Gilbert and his idea for happiness for all people. Another connection I made was to the first sentence on the passage of Self-defeat, “External success is achieved through competition with others” (Brooks 2). I connected this to athletes and how they compete to be better and/or the best in order to be successful. Being an athlete myself I can relate to this because I would always compete to my best ability to get better each practice and each game. Susan also mentions that it’s okay to have questions because that isn’t mean that you are done with a text, which is another perfect excuse to go back and reread to get a deeper understanding which is an annotating strategy. A question I had was how do they trace that core sin leads to behavior that makes certain people feel ashamed? Susan also mentions that analyzing allows you to ask yourself more questions and to see what the other is really trying to get across to its reader. In Brooks’s article, his main message was striving to be the best version of yourself you need to allow for failure, hurt, caregivers, and stumble to only succeed.

Active reading, critical reading, and informal reading responses help me to become more integrated in my work and support the information I have. I feel that I have become more engaged and have better approaches to each aspect of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading.

Below is the link to my informal reading response:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EJ-hdQW7jC1kcRDFFJf4Pdwho6Cy5KGh5aa69tIBlfA/edit

Below are three examples of annotated pages from “The Moral Bucket List” by David Brooks that are also coded for active reading categories: