My Past Experiences with Annotating

    Throughout my early literary career, annotating was something that I despised. It kept breaking the flow of the text and forced me to stop reading frequently, which was quite frustrating. However, as I began to write literary analysis and criticism essays in high school, I realized that no matter how annoying annotating text might be for me, it makes it much easier to analyze the text in the future.

    At the moment, I have a slightly tense love/hate relationship with annotations. Although I know that they are invaluable when writing an essay based on a specific text, it personally just doesn't feel good to break the flow of reading every thirty seconds or so to annotate. It definitely helps, though, to see my own annotations when I'm skimming through text, or when I'm looking for a specific passage.

    When reading a text for the first time, I prefer to read uninterrupted, not stopping to take notes or highlight. Once I feel that I'm familiar with the text, I am then willing to go back through and annotate. This allows me to enjoy reading with the flow, while making sure I am able to ensure that I don't struggle too much while searching and analyzing specific parts of the text in the future. When annotating, I usually highlight (sometimes noting with pen) key mood shifts, pieces of symbolism, or foreshadowing. Whenever I come across anything I don't fully understand, I make a note to myself to come back to it later, to avoid skipping anything that might be significant.