English Professor Teaches You How to Annotate Your Text For Success

Remember that when you read, whether it’s a novel, a play, a comic book, a news article, a poem, a scholarly essay, a self-help book, whatever it is, the author of that text has written it to inspire you; entertain you; inform you; engage with you; teach you; make you think. Really, that author is trying to have a conversation with you. As a reader,

you need to speak back, meaning, you need to engage with the text, peruse it, ask it questions, call out moments that need clarification for you, seek out important points, take note of patterns, symbols, motifs, and/or themes, record your feelings and observations as you move from page to page. And these things often just automatically happen in

our mind as we read. You might be reading and just quickly think to yourself, “This is so difficult to understand!” Or, “This is so boring!” Or, “I can relate to this character.” Or, “I don’t know what that word means.” Or, “Oooh, it’s starting to get really good here.” But, when you start to actually mark up your book and write these thoughts down, then you are in the act

of annotating the text. You are taking notes. Hi, everyone. My name is Dr. Whitney Kosters, and I am a professor of English. I’ve been teaching literature for the past 20 years, and my PhD is in Victorian literature, and if you know anything about the Victorian period, then you are well aware that it was the age of the novel. The really, really… BIG novel. This was the

time of serialization, so many 19th-century novels ran upwards of 800-1000 pages with character lists that sometimes seemed longer than the books themselves. So, during my graduate program, I was trying to get through a reading list that included novels like Middlemarch, Bleak House, Wuthering Heights, David Copperfield, Vanity Fair, Villette, and all their characters, plot points,