From Inquiry to Academic Writing, p.29-32

TEACHING NOTE: 

“READING AS AN ACT OF COMPOSING: ANNOTATING”

Textbook: Stuart Greene and April Lidinsky’s From Inquiry to Academic Writing: A Text and Reader, second edition, 2012, p. 29-32.

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1. What does “annotating” mean?

   • Leaving your mark on the page / first act of composing

   • When you mark the pages of a text, you are reading critically, engaging with the ideas of others, questioning and testing those ideas, and inquiring into their significance.

2. Critical thinking is sometimes called active reading.

3. When you read actively and critically, you bring your knowledge, experiences, and interests to a text, so that you can respond to the writer, continuing the conversation the writer has begun.

4. What do experienced readers do and don’t do when they read?

   • They read strategically, looking for the writer’s claims, for the writer’s key ideas and terms, and for connections with key ideas and terms in other texts.

   • They also read to discern/distinguish what conversation the writer has entered, and how the writer’s argument is connected to those he or she makes reference to.

   • They do not try to memorize a text or assume they must understand it completely before they respond to it.

5. What kinds of things you should mark down while reading a paper?

   • What arguments is this author responding to?

   • Is the issue relevant or significant?

   • Is the author’s evidence legitimate? Sufficient?

   • What would the counterarguments be?

6. Good readers consider not just what a writer says (the content), but how he or she says it.

7. What are the two benefits of annotating your reading?

   • Easier for you to participate in class discussion

   • Easier for you to begin writing your essay

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American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (1993):

1. Issue & factors: Racism, discrimination in employment, institutional practices are the factors that led to the spatial isolation of black Americans or more specifically, the creation of the ghettos.

   • Racism = white avoidance of neighborhoods containing blacks, black poverty

   • Post 1950s, government promoted slum clearance and relocated ghetto residents in to multi-story, high-density housing projects.

2. Growing rejection of racist sentiments by whites and the reinforcement of anti-racist laws led to a higher concern for black segregation.

   • Evidence: The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Gautreaux and Shannon court decisions

   • Issue remained: black communities remained as segregated as ever in 1980.

   • Intense racial isolation = hypersegregation

   • Evidence needed #

3. 1970s: Racial problem was resolved in some levels but not all; racism still restricted the residential freedom of black Americans.

   • Evidence needed #