How to annotate a book
Speaking of style, you’ll develop your own annotation style very quickly. But like a writing style, your annotating style can always be improved even if your style works for you. So here are some ideas for annotating.
First off, let’s be clear: where does one annotate? In the book’s text and in its margins. Interlineations are notes you insert between the text’s lines (difficult to do in most books). Marginalia are notes you write in the text’s margins.
Use marks. Use question marks to show what is unclear or confusing. Use exclamation marks or smiley faces to show your agreement or delight. Employ other marks, and invent still others with their own significance!
Marginal comments serve many purposes. Summarizing a passage’s information in the margins can help you find information quickly and can help you go beyond a first-draft reading quickly the next time you read a passage. (Summarizing in the margins means you’ll never accidentally separate your summaries from the book summarized, as you might if you wrote your summaries in a notebook or somewhere else.) Stating your agreements and disagreements with the text helps keep your reading more conversational and may give you material for use in later assignments – essays and discussions, for instance – if you’re reading for a class or book group. Reflecting on associations you’re making with the text – associations such as other books and movies, personal memories, and current events the text reminds you of – makes the reading more personal and more valuable to you in the long run. Your book’s margins may begin to resemble a shorthand journal or diary! Associations, such as a song, a dream, or a stray memory, may seem random, but they may carry more psychic weight than you may realize at first. When you connect the dots during a subsequent reading, those connections can be powerful! (I love to write about how my experiences in reading a single text differ over time.)
Highlight, bracket, or underline text you think will be the most significant to you when you read those pages again later. Consider labeling the text that you highlighted, bracketed, or underlined: you’d be leaving a better trail for yourself for subsequent readings.
Circle words you’re not familiar with, look them up, and write their definitions in the margins beside them. Consider creating on a blank page in the book’s front or back matter a running glossary complete with the page numbers where the new words can be found in context.
Mark and label a work’s literary and rhetorical devices. This will assist you in any assignment involving literary analysis by helping you to discover how the author gets across his material. It may also lead to an appreciation of the writer’s craft that could improve your own writing style! You may wish to use different shapes (triangles, rectangles, ovals) or colors to mark different literary devices. Draw a quick legend to later remind yourself of what each shape or color stands for.
Make impromptu graphic organizers – tables, diagrams, and the like – in the margins to summarize your understanding of complicated passages. That way, you won’t have to learn the material all over again in subsequent readings.
Cross-reference topics and ideas that recur in the text. If you’re interested in references to tragedy in a book about the history of theater, for instance, write the page number of the most important text on tragedy in the margins beside the book’s other references to tragedy. That most important reference to tragedy would also be a place to jot down the page numbers where all of the other references to tragedy you’ve discovered can be found. (You might even put letters such as T, M, or B after those page numbers to indicate that the information is at the top, middle or bottom of the page in question.) You’ll be able to quickly find related material the next time you use the book!
The next logical step when you begin to cross-reference is to start an index in the back or to supplement the book’s existing index. (Click here for an example of an index I put together for one of my core books.) I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve referred back to my own index to find things in a book. The index sometimes also develops into a shorthand list of things that I found helpful or inspiring in a book, so my indexes have sometimes served me as alphabetized lists of writing prompts.
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