Active Reading

Active Reading is a process of marking a text to show not what's happening in the author's wording, but what's going on your experience of the text: the relationships that you are finding among ideas or examples, or the associations that you are making with your prior knolwedge or experience.

1. Underline or highlight terms, phrases, and passages that seem important or interesting, especially if they are relevant to answering any reading questions provided.

2. In the margins, write words or phrases to yourself whenever you think of examples or other connected or explanatory ideas from some other work or from your own experience.

3. Write a
?
in the margin where the author seems to be saying something important that you don't understand, or that seems wrong or backward.

4. In the margins, draw a two-headed arrow like
<---->
to mark distinctions / contrasts ("this vs. that" or "not this but that").

5. Or draw arrows coming together
---><---
in the margin to indicated connections between ideas or examples ("this is related to that, or is the same as that"). The more surprising or interesting the connection, the bigger and darker the arrows.

6. Mark lines or passages that tell a story or suggest a progression with an arrow with a head and a tail like
>---->

7. Indicate connections or apparent contradictions you see between statements on different pages by finding and noting the page number in the margin like
"see 59"
(for connections to an idea on another page) or
"see 59?"
(for apparent contradictions on another page)