When it comes to reading scholarly work in history, I like to keep it simple with paper and pen—and maybe some fun highlighter colors too. I print out texts on paper whenever a printer is accessible, making sure to incorporate margins wide enough for annotations. I usually mark up texts with bright colored pens and accompanying highlighter colors that emphasize important or noteworthy parts of the text. I enjoy the tangibility of marking up text on paper, especially during this time of online learning when almost everything is read on a computer screen. Ultimately, I feel that this is the most comfortable form of annotating for me and allows me to effectively deconstruct texts, line by line.
My process of understanding and unpacking scholarly work begins with a brief read-through in order to gain an overall understanding of the context. After the first reading, I re-read the text slowly, taking the time to highlight, underline, and bracket terms and phrases that stand out to me and that I want to further examine.
I start my annotations by highlighting the main claim of the paragraph, and re-phrasing it in my own words to confirm my understanding. From there, I move on to identifying various rhetorical strategies and what they accomplish for the broader meaning of the text. Next, I search up and define unknown terms and unpack any other terms that I may have highlighted. I finish by interpreting the key terms and key concepts that I had bracketed and underlined. These interpretations are especially important to me when I refer back to the text and need to further engage with the author's arguments and the larger scholarly debate.