The most common annotation that I find myself making while I read is when I can connect something in the text to my life in one way or another. As someone who had been a vegetarian for five years, this was especially common in David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster” since many of the things he mentioned resonated with me or I had already known. I also always write the questions that pop into my head as I’m reading. A lot of the time these end up getting answered as I continue to read, but I like to include them. I also always highlight words that I don’t know the definition of in a different color so that I remember to go back and look them up if I can’t figure out what it means by the context.
I also find myself trying to find the deeper meaning of stories a lot of the time. My entire freshman year of English in high school we read a total of three books because we spent so long trying to unpack everything within the story and find the deeper meaning that the author was trying to convey. Now that I’ve had so much practice with this, I find myself doing it almost automatically even if I don’t always note my thought process as I’m reading. I also usually highlight or underline parts of the story that I think will be important or will come up in class discussion (or even just that I find interesting) so that they are easy to access when I go back to the reading later on.
