INTRODUCTION TO ANNOTATED NOTES

1. INTRODUCTION TOANNOTATED NOTES Annotating notes is a way to actively engage and connect with your text as you are reading.

2. Why Annotate? • Have you ever read an entire page of a text book or a whole chapter of a novel and remembered nothing? What just happened?! • Annotating helps keep focus and create meaning while reading text, particularly challenging text • There are many ways to annotate.

3. DEFINE WORDS OR SLANG • Make the words real with examples from your experiences; explore why the author would have use a particular word or phrase • EX: “I think it lacks of twelve” • “I think it lacks of twelve” Note: Lacks of means before. It is before twelve.

4. Make Connections to Outside Sources • Connect current reading to other texts you have read or seen, including: • Movies • Comic Books/Graphic Novels • News Events • Other books, stories, plays, songs, or poems OMG! Okonkwo’s constant desire to prove his manliness in Things Fall Apart reminds me of “Poker Face” by Lady Gaga! Hiding emotions can be tough.

5. Make Connections to Other Parts of the Text • Feel free to use direct quotes from the book Wait a minute! Polonius is a joke. Here he is hiding behind a curtain to spy on Hamlet, but earlier he was telling Laertes to always be on his best behavior and not to look bad in front of others. What’s all this “to thine own self be true” business about?! I don’t trust his character.

6. Draw a Picture • When a visual connections helps explain ideas or relationships. Draw it! LEADERHIP Integrity Results-Orientated Courage Concern Creativity Vision

7. Re-Write, Paraphrase, or Summarize • “I should hasten to admit, however, that there was a considerable hiatus between the first stolen book and the second. Another noteworthy point is that the first was stolen from snow and the second from fire. Not to omit that others were also given to her. All told, she owned fourteen books, but she saw her story as being made up pre-dominantly of ten of them. Of those ten, six were stolen, one showed up at the kitchen table, two were made for her by a hidden Jew, and one was delivered by a soft, yellow-dressed afternoon” (Zusak 30). There were many books obtained, but ten made up her story.

8. Make Meaningful Connections • “Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here ‘I lost my land’ is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate—’we lost our land’” (Steinbeck 151). My dad’s work experienced something like this. One man lost a job due to the failing economy, he got mad; then, another lost a job—more and more people were losing their jobs and building a momentum of anger and need deeper than the first…this can become a threat to an employer.

9. Describe a New Perspective • “In fact, the heavy multitaskers weren’t even good at multitasking. They were considerably less adept at switching between tasks than the more infrequent multitaskers” (Carr 2). Perhaps what I consider multitasking (watching The Jersey Shore and working on Annotating Notes for Honors English 10 at the same time) is actually not effective at all.

10. Explain Historical Context or Traditions • “At the most one could say that his chi or personal god was good. But the Ibo people have a proverb that when a man says yes his chi says yes also” (Achebe 27). Ibo people value storytelling, and a proverb is a succinct way to story tell and explain complex ideas in few words.

11. Offer Analysis or Interpretation Hamlet is such a complex character. He likely exhibits so much strange behavior because of the extreme trauma he has experienced and the heavy load of responsibility for such a young person.

12. Point out and Discuss Literary Techniques • “Montag felt the guilt of his hands. His fingers were like ferrets that had done some evil and now never rested, always stirred and picked and hid in pockets,…” (Bradbury 105). It’s a simile! I can see that his hands were restless because he felt mischievous or bad about his actions.