There are many ways people can read and study but I have my own way. I usually have a hard time reading and following along with the text, sometimes even forgetting what line I was on. To fight against this, I trace the text with my cursor while reading it in order to help navigate the it and better and pay attention. The text I will be referencing is Marcy Norton's "The Chicken or the Iegue: Human-Animal Relationships and the Columbian Exchange". Reading Norton's text was no easy feat. There was meaning behind every passage that challenged the way we thought about domestication. Understanding the passage in question required annotation in order to break the key facts. Highlighting, and even connecting it with my past knowledge helped me retain a lot of information I read. I should add that taking mental notes of things is just as important as writing it down. Along with the confusion of understanding the text, there was also the problems of not knowing some vocabulary words. Norton's excerpt was filled with words I never saw before and the most logical thing I thought of doing was to do a quick google search. Understanding the vocabulary words is essential to having a strong to the text while reading. I only recently started doing this and realized just how much it has truly helped me.

As shown in the picture above I sometimes use context clues in order to find out the meaning of a certain word if I cannot just simply google search it. The term "iegue" was a pain to look for on google, so I just read around it and found the meaning of it. When I do find the definition, I tend to highlight it and comment saying "definition of (insert word)".

Another important step I do in order to connect with the text better, is get context. Sometimes I tend to look up a summary of a text if I can in order to slightly understand what the text is talking about. I do this so that I know what to expect and focus on while reading.

Another important thing you must remember, is what type of text you are reading. While reading, you should find out whether or not the author is responding to someone's claim or idea, adding on to it, or even challenging it. You should also be able to tell whether or not what you are reading is a primary source or a secondary source. In my case, I knew I was reading a secondary source because it was written in 2015. Also, you should be able to tell if the text is a poem, short story, essay, article or whatever really. Knowing this will help you greatly in deciding what style of annotating you would like to do. Annotating doesn't always have to mean writing down notes and highlighting, but instead you can just think about it. Processing the text mentally and understanding the text is a way of annotating in its own.

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