Any advice on annotating Veeky Forums?
I'm trying to do so now for the first time as I've read that it'll allow you to engage with the text better. It feels as though I'm trying to please some kind of imaginary high school English teacher peering over my shoulder by fooling him into thinking I'm insightful rather than filling the margins with anything genuine, and the whole experience feels like a really distracting and unnecessarily ironic way to approach a text.
Other urls found in this thread:
flavorwire.com
twitter.com
Think about why you're writing notes. You're not writing them to show them off or improving the book or some bullshit.
You are aiming to get more out of the book by writing notes, think then what it is you're looking to get out
Are they to understand the psychology of characters more?
Are they to note interesting uses of language?
Are they to determine more succinctly the message or emotion the writer is trying to send?
If its all of the above and/or any more reasons keep them in mind and be production orientated. You're not aiming to be the most profound thinker on Earth you're getting work done.
Be liberal but efficient about how you annotate. You're not writing an essay or substancial notes, that can come later, you're simply pin pointing interesting moments that you may not ever even have to look back over for that act to be helpful.
Keep them short as possible to get the point across, you'll generally remember why you marked moments by a star alone. Single words come after and then only if it seems very strange use a short description.
You don't even need to explain why a moment in the text is interesting to you.
Annotating is just as much if not more for raising questions to yourself than it is for actively interpreting.
Thanks. What if you just don't think of intelligent questions when you're reading?
Start with basic things, is my suggestion, and your comprehension will improve. Follow themes, motifs, repetitions that seem significant. Look up words and allusions you don't understand
I'll try and do that. Thanks for taking the time to help me out.
Even just marking something that you found interesting or enjoyable for even the most mundane reason is enough. What seems like nothing much at first can build into a pattern that can build into an insight.
Unironically good thread.
>defacing texts
Gross, especially when it's taught in schools as a pseudointellectual replacement for actual critical reading
Just right your observations, questions, and etc on a second sheet of paper, maybe put a tab on that page to refer back to if it's super important. You'll have more space and a not-super-fucked-up book.
On-text annotation is fine if you're DOING something with the text, but don't scrawl all over shit haphazardly to marginally better your understanding of a work
>right
Fuck, now I sound retarded
>But muh mint condition
Euthanize yourself please
Point out where I said anything about keeping texts mint condition you sputtering mongoloid
There's literally nothing to be gained from spilling ink all over a page in an attempt to look like you understood more than you did.
Who are you to make a sweeping declaration of what benefit annotating will be for every single individual in every possible literary project?
I imagine you're just intimidated by the idea reading takes work and doesn't just manifest from your ego serendipitously
>Who are you to make a sweeping declaration of what benefit annotating will be for every single individual in every possible literary project?
>On-text annotation is fine if you're DOING something with the text, but don't scrawl all over shit haphazardly to marginally better your understanding of a work
OH GOD HELP I'M FUCKING RETARDED HRRRUUUGHHHH*
ftfy
And again what if scrawl haphazardly is of significant benefit to some people and they don't have quite the attachment to clean paper as you do
i used to underline and make marginalia profusely, but i found this wasn't helpful on review because for some reason i would read only the passages not underlined on the assumption i had missed something, because my underlines were not helpful, because so profuse. now i pretend that every inch of ink in the book is costing me. i don't really underline unless it's super important, otherwise i either bracket a good paragraph, or draw a perpendicular line marking good sentences. if something is particularly worthwhile, i copy the passage onto a legal pad, put the book aside, and write my thoughts longform; this i do more so when going back to the text a second or third time, which is easier because visually cleaner
>what if
Neat whataboutism, care to explain the mechanism behind this wondrous process or are you going to decline under a platitude about how everyone's different so you can continue to be offended?
You're assuming the benefit of annotations is on reviewing and not a tool to focus close reading. That the act itself is where most of the benefit is not the product
If something genuinely sparks you then mark the spot with a check and on a separate notebook write the page number and the idea you had or connection you made. I haven't read a single bit of marginalia that wasn't vacuous tripe littering the page like a shout in a theater. If what you're writing is a reflex reaction rather than a response then you'll cringe going back to it.
You have to be some type of turbo autist to consider the notion there are people different than you to be a platitude.
that's true, and i've encountered this problem. don't know, i guess i've struck a balance. for the amount of essential and non-essential stuff my job requires i read, i do find that for the essential stuff, i need to be able to efficiently recall the salient features of a large number of texts by referring to them physically. there's only so much memory can bear, and you're a pseud if you haven't encountered that limit. on the other hand i will say that just having the pen in my hand seems to increase my apprehension in precisely the way you describe.
It literally is a platitude, it adds nothing to the argument and you're using it in lieu of a logical explanation of how your pet theory works.
calling a platitude a notion doesn't negate its being a platitude
My proposition has been simply that this act is of potential benefit, your proposition has been that it is of no benefit against your own subjective preference for a clean book. Subjectivity is clearly relevant to the argument before even getting into the tremendous variation in how individuals analyse information efficiently.
In either case the mechanism has been described in the thread already, its the simple proposition that annotating has the capability to reveal significant moments and tendencies within a text that will aid a persons reading. That given you never know what benefit any single annotation will yield; liberal and undiscerning application may be the optimum approach weighed against the expense of time, effort and clarity.
Its all about how you feel about the book you're dealing with, if its something like a linguistic analysis of Finnegan's Wake its going to be easily justifiable to wallpaper the book in notes.
it's so obvious which of you reads and which of you does not lol. i'll give you the hint it's the guy who thinks "everyone is different" is not a platitude. it's not the guy using naive empirical subjectivism to defend his stupid urge to scribble on his books
Its not a platitude in regards to the argument at hand. I take platitude as referring to a proposition which can not be yielded as a predicate to further propositions in the given argument.
>scribble in the margins because lmao who knows maybe you'll find something ;D
>instead of just fucking reading the book
If the author meant to express in a way that requires tactile interaction, it would not be done in a medium that requires no tactile interaction, you humongously pretentious pseudointellectual.
If you can't adequately digest a text by reading, practice better reading comprehension. If you have thoughts or inspirations from the text worth preserving, do so in detail on a sheet of paper or etc. where your space is not limited. 'Annotation' is a poor compromise between the two invented as a way to keep autistic schoolchildren engaged with the rest of the class, and the assertion that it confers any benefit to comprehensive comes out of the same pseudoscientific background as the assertion that vocalizing entire texts aids in comprehension.
You can do whatever you like to your books, but don't actively spew misinformation to people earnestly trying to better their reading comprehension. You're just enabling dilettante behavior.
The difference between the two of us is that I'm only proposing how one should go about this act and how it may be of benefit whereas you are deciding that you should declare it universally useless without any mechanistic justication or empirical evidence.
The best I can do at this point is show that many great writers annotated when they read. Though I know its no firm evidence it was of benefit to them it does show that its not at all something limited to schoolchildren and people can make up their own minds.
flavorwire.com
>universally
>On-text annotation is fine if you're DOING something with the text, but don't scrawl all over shit haphazardly to marginally better your understanding of a work
HELP I'M HAVING A GODDAMN RELAPSE ADSFAFAGSGSSD
*ftfy
Spend less time constructing straw arguments and more time formulating a logical position.
Also, dank appeal to authority. Your favorite fallible human engaged in this behavior, it'll make you just like him! Famous people are never wrong, after all.
>people can make up their own minds
Nobody ever asserted that they couldn't; I just don't see the value in shitting in a urinal just because it's possible to do so
>spend less time constructing straw arguments and more time formulating a logical position.
>dank appeal to authority
>"Though I know its no firm evidence it was of benefit to them "
I doubt you need to annotate as much as you do, and I doubt you are annotating what can't be just as easily noted with marginalia.
Trust me, your stance against "defacing texts" made you seem far more retarded than any unintentional typo.
>'Annotation' is a poor compromise between the two invented as a way to keep autistic schoolchildren engaged with the rest of the class
The mental gymnastics that some of you go through to defend your lazy reading habits really is astounding.
I like to debug the sentences, draw lines between what the sentence references to. Often it helps me to find irregularities in the text.
Try to use multiple colors for different topics, themes, ideas and consider the "empty" unannoted text a color of its own "unimportant" so you dont end up highlighting the entire page.
so insecure
>I doubt you need to annotate as much as you do, and I doubt you are annotating what can't be just as easily noted with marginalia.
Those aren't my annotations, it's just an image I pulled from Google.
>flavorwire.com
Mark Twain has convinced me that writing in my books is worthwhile.
Do you guys annotate every book that you read or just ones you think are worthwhile?
school shit only
>I'll cling to this because someone else famous did it and I want to be just like him when I grow up
You're not proving the point you think you're proving
When I read for law school I have 8 staedtler highlighter's in my left hand. Each color represent's something different. eg. Holdings, analysis, facts, plaintiff argument, etc. Then in my right hand I have a Pilot G-Tec-C Gel .25 for written notes, because its so fine you can fit a lot in the margins of the book. I'll write out what types of sections the pages are, what the logic is, or funny little notes.
The goal of all of this is to create a mind map of the material so that if I am called on in class I will have an answer for the professor and not get counted absent for being unprepared. This is the most time efficient way that doesn't lose quality of understanding.
I know this isn't helpful for normal reading material. Sorry.
I do not like marking up books, but I do keep notes. Usually the page number with the first two-three words of something I want to go back to. And that's only if it's particularly worthwhile.
Sometimes I'll write titles for chapters that act as a brief summary. I find this helps me remember the book better even if I never look at the notes again.
Some books are worth that effort, others are just lazy reads. It depends.