Learning Outcome #3:
As a person who asks a lot of questions while practicing active, critical reading, I appreciate “Interrogating Texts: 6 Reading Habits to Develop in your First Year at Harvard” by Susan Gilroy. I always ask questions of the text to further my understanding of it. This has really helped me to engage with the texts and further develop my inquiry, learning, and thinking processes for the texts that I read. An example of an annotation that I used active reading in is in Blog #1 where I annotate Michael Erard’s “See Through Words.” In this specific post I “followed the thread,” meaning that I took two of the questions that I asked within my annotations and furthered my thoughts. This was a very tactful way to engage further with the text because it allowed me to really think about some of the ideas Erard was illustrating and how important they were to his essay. In the annotations on Erard’s paper, I asked questions about what seemed to be the most important part of the paragraph. The seemingly encrypted language was important for me to understand so I inquired about it to the side. When I followed the thread to further the inquiry, I realized that asking the question in that spot of the essay was very important, and it further reinforced to me how important active and critical reading is along with interrogating the text in order to make the text meaningful to me. In Blog #3, I respond to reading “The Trouble With Medicine’s Metaphors” and my thoughts on metaphor and its importance. This informal reading response was very important for my understanding of this text and the other two texts, one of them being “See Through Words,” that I was going to use in my first paper. I had to actively compare the course readings, as Gilroy suggests, to see how I could argue a point using all of the sources throughout the paper. This informal reading response was a step further in this direction because I put in three quotes from my three different sources, allowing me to see how they compare and contrast and further my understanding of the topic of metaphor as a whole.
