Reading Strategies—Annotating

Concept sheet | English Language Arts

Secondary

1-5

Definition

Annotating is taking notes and writing down comments.

When to do it

While reading the text

After reading the text

Reading intention

Improve understanding

Identify specific information

Identify meaningful passages

Outcome

Deeper understanding

Easy access to information when reviewing

Better information/content recall

How to Do It

Highlight

Find and identify relevant information and/or passages.

Take Notes and/or Comment

Write down thoughts, summaries, questions, ideas, personal reactions, possible connections and/or predictions.

To learn more about a strategy, click its name.

Previewing	Skimming & Scanning	Questioning
Get an overview of the text.	Quickly search & find information	Ask yourself questions
Visualizing	Making Connections	Inferring
Create mental pictures	Relate to the text	Read between the lines
Annotating	Decoding	Summarizing
Write down notes & comments	Understand challenging words	Sum up main idea & key elements
Synthesizing	Evaluating	Analyzing
Explore sources to come up with new perspectives	Form an opinion on the quality of the text	Look at the structure and techniques used