Annotating was NOT what I thought it was by Hanaa Haleem

  Annotating was NOT what I thought it was by Hanaa Haleem

8th grade me in social studies about to take my annotation quiz: Excited knowing that I finally get to use my aesthetic highlighters and romanticize schoolwork. Same thing in writing class where we were required to annotate the story we wrote an essay about. Flash forward to a year later — JANE EYRE by Charlotte Bronte makes its first appearance in my hands after purchasing it from my Honors English class. 

Knowing that I thrived doing annotations in writing and social studies last year, I had high hopes for how to annotate it over fall break. “Tis is so easy, it's just playing around with cute highlighters while reading arnold story from the 1600s”----WRONG! Honors English annotations? Yup, that's a whole other thing. It is not aesthetic at all. It takes a large time commitment and thought as you annotate each line of text and interpret it.

I remember how I thought I would be able to get ahead in my annotations since we were given about 10 days to annotate 5 chapters, but annotating 10 pages itself felt too long already since I had to really think and understand the text instead of just highlighting it. This continued to feel more dreading like a chore as we got farther into the book, and I remember my only goal being to finish annotating the required pages than to actually sit and understand it as it was hard to make time for it already. 

A month later, I was finally relieved once we were done with the book. From then on, annotating any other book felt like light work as I reminded myself of how I was able to annotate that difficult of a book (500+ pages btw). 

For any freshmen in honors english reading this, here are some tips I have:

• Just annotate with one pen instead of using multiple. 

• Do not write big paragraphs in the margin. Instead, write small phrases summarizing the section you just annotated

• Bookmark the pages you believe are VALUABLE for discussion and writing about in your LAPs

• When in class discussion, use a separate pen (preferably red or blue ink) to write down new ideas you came across in, which you can also use to expand your LAP analysis too