well hello it's good to have you here thank you I'm dr. T and we're going to talk about annotation today your first guest is my dog being who is trying to read the sunday review of the New York Times but couldn't quite make it through she got a little sleepy a little distracted a little unfocused and started to drift away that can happen when we're reading unless you adopt these new habits and skills and practices that I'm going to talk about that come under the umbrella of annotation annotations note-taking it's what you've been taught and probably have been doing for most of your life but it's much more subtle and much more complex in some ways than you might have originally believed or known so we're gonna talk about annotation how to do it what it means and then we're going to practice it in almost every experiment every reading every time we get together to do anything in our classes and an awful lot in your professional life and sometimes in your personal life too annotation can look something like this can be highlighting sentences individual words circles arrows exclamation points dashes any kind of doodle at all there are two parts to successful annotation and they work in different parts of the brain the first is doodles and drawings if you doodle on what you're reading then you are interacting cognitively with the ideas with the content with the structure that you're looking at on the page it can be any kind of doodling I tend to like underlining underlining means this is really important or I'll put a hash out in the margin a hash means yeah take a look at this or an asterisk an asterisk means whoa you're gonna want to bring this into your essay this is so good don't miss this but you could use lightening bolts smiley faces clouds it doesn't matter but some kinds of symbols that have meaning to you and knowing when you go back to them when you're reviewing your annotations will remind you why you did them so the first is symbols the second is words you have to use words it's a combination of the symbols which are kind of language and then the actual language that we use can be full sentences can be paragraphs can be individual words you might write Wow in the margin you might write this is really important it connects back to that first paragraph or you could write here's the summary of what I just read according to Copernicus the stars are and you summarize your information using language so those two skills combining symbol system and words any text can be annotated now we need to define what a text is a text could be a police officer giving you directions to the park that you write down a text could be a movie whose lines were so funny you want to share with your friends a text could be a geography textbook it could be a letter from a friend it could be a walk through the park where you write down the names of birds that you see anytime you engage with external information and write about it or catalog it or use the read write part of your brain you are annotating see this is my other dog nut and she's a smart tag dog she's so smart she knows how to annotate to the point of annotation is to learn how to distinguish to make hierarchies of what's important and why they are important so you would write in your text or use sticky notes or index cards in ways to help separate what's important to you to the author and what is not to help you see patterns to help you make connections between important points or to remind yourself that you want to come back to this idea in an essay you're going to ride and a quiz you're going to have to take there are lots and lots of different ways to annotate the key is that you are engaging with the text while you are actually engaging with the text annotation is useful everywhere it's useful in your professional life where your boss tells you some elements that you need to complete or send you on an errand or when you are working as a manager and you're letting other people know what they need to do you've come in with your notes that's a kind of annotation it's useful in your personal life when you're sitting down in a relationship and it's time to have a serious conversation you know I'm just kidding no it's true you just say to your spouse you say or your partner you say wait what you're saying is really important so I want to annotate can you give me just a second to get my notebook ok maybe wouldn't work as well there but in your academic experience it will definitely work well when you know you have a quiz coming due and you know you have to write an essay when you need to remember all the bones or how to mean how to mix different viscosities of cement all of these are elements that you want to retain an annotations key goal is that it helps you retain information why might that be important because when you are annotating you are reading with a purpose and this is the key technique for annotation is that you know why you're reading and what your goal is in the reading sometimes reading is just for pleasure maybe you've got a rocking chair in the foyer and you come out with a cat and a couple of Earl Grey tea and the light is streaming down and you have hours and hours to read and enjoy the book that you've selected in your book club most of us don't get to read like that most of us have three or four classes were taking look at work we've got families we've got dogs to walk so our time is valuable I'm having a goal for how to use our reading time allows us to use that reading time more efficiently you will forget 90% of what you read within eight hours of having read it that means if you spent two hours reading a textbook you're only gonna retain about twenty minutes of it maybe only ten unless you annotate annotation is an opportunities to study while you're reading and that's what the cognitive studies tell us is if you study what you read directly to reading it you're likely to retain 20 to 30% more of the information plus you set an anchor down in the ocean where you can go back to that information and remind yourself of it so as you're reading you get to a line that you like you underline it underlining it is studying it which means it's retaining it or in this case you don't want to write in the book you get a sticky note you slap the sticky note on the book and you're right on the sticky note or you rakaat record on your Apple iPhone or you find ways to talk with your friends or keep notes in a journal or stick index cards into your text it doesn't really matter how you an annotate it matters that you annotate and to know what your purpose is how do you know what your purpose is well the best way to do it is to ask for every reading assignment you get you should ask your professor or the police officer or your friend or your boss why am i reading this what's my goal is there some context I should know should I pay attention to particular elements I'll give you an example when I was in graduate school I wasn't very bright I was smart enough but we had a student who was smarter than I was and when the professor said please read chapters 1 2 & 3 for next Tuesday the student sitting next to me raised her hand and said hey doc what are we reading these chapters for and the professor or lifted an eyebrow and said you know that's a great question chapters 1 & 2 I really just review so you can skim those chapter 3 is where the serious stuff is so spend a little more time there Jim we just got saved I don't know an hour and a half of reading not that chapters 1 2 weren't important but for the purpose of the reading for the purpose of this class for what the professor wanted us to produce chapters 1 & 2 were just general information that he wanted skimmed it was chapter 3 where he wanted to spend our time so where should we spend our time in chapter 3 it's also true if you have a quiz or a test hey Doc what kind of information are we gonna be tested on what kind of questions might you ask what will be this nature will live ESA will it be short answer will it be a true or false fill in the blank the more information you know about why you are reading why you are studying and how you will have to produce information after you read the more efficient and enjoyable and productive your reading experience will be there are lots of ways to annotate you don't have to write in the text you can use the electronic tools most of you have an electronic book for our class there is a highlighting tool and there is a note-taking tool Lori will attach a note wherever in the text you want to keep one doesn't matter how you do it what matters is that you do it let's see I think I'm a little off here now it might seem counterintuitive that annotation will save you time but I'm here to tell you 20 years of experience of annotating effectively and teaching others how to do it that you will save enormous amounts of time why for two reasons one is part of annotations you set the amount of time that you're going to use to read you say to yourself huh I got 10 pages in this chapter I'm gonna give myself half an hour you set a timer you turn off your spouse you turn off the dishwasher your turn off the dogs Instagram Facebook the Falling it everything gets turned off because for that 20 30 minutes what you're doing is annotating and you do it and you don't lose focus you stay focused and then you're done then you reward yourself you go for a walk eat some cookies you do some push-ups you go out and whistle at the birds you do anything you want to reward yourself for spending that dedicated time focus time on reading there have been some fascinating studies that show that students who try to multitask waste on average 40% of the time in other words if you read for 40 minutes focused and you just earned yourself 20 minutes to go do whatever you want you'll be surprised the first couple times you try and how much reading you can get done in a short amount of time when you're focused when you have your goal here's another reason it saves you time not just that you establish time but that you know what you're doing where you're going and so you avoid problems imagine you want to go out to oh I don't know Rio so to the mountains there and someone says go climb that mountain which is the equivalent to read that chapter and so you wander off and you start climbing and you get lost over here and there's a grizzly bear so you have to go back around and you find that over there oh gosh there's a bunch of brambles I have to go back this way and now you might eventually get to the top and you certainly had an adventure but if you had said well why am i climbing the mountain what's the best path up the mountain what should I be doing while I'm on the mountain then you would still have enjoyed and had an adventure but you would have done it without all the heartache and trauma because imagine when you get down from the mountain and I say where are the berries and you say what berries and I say well now we're gonna make a berry pie from the berries you collected on the mountain but you didn't collect any berries and so now you have to go back and do it again and this time collect the berries that's the same as reading a text if I say - you're gonna write an essay then as you are reading you're collecting quotations you're gathering ideas you're thinking through what you might want to talk about so that when you get to the end of the text you're ready to write you're ready to begin your exploration you don't have to read it again because you had a purpose you knew why you were reading and you read with that goal in mind it's a little bit like a sports team let's imagine that our class is a giant soccer club and we're ready to play for the championship we have two choices one is we get to there the day we get to the field the pitch the day of the the day of the game and we jump out we start playing and they shoot and score so we know that guys their shooter and then they dribble in passing scores so we know that guys their pastor and then they Bowl so a halftime we're down ten to nothing because we spent the first half of our time figuring out who their players were what their plays were we didn't pre read which is the second choice we didn't pre read the team and come in knowing that number two is the dangerous player the number three likes to push that number four is their long-range shooter but number five could only shoot in close and that their goalie has a special affinity for the corners now that we know that when we go into the reading we go into our purposeful reading we know how to get through it what does this mean in terms of a text this means skim the text before you read it is there any introductory material to read is there a summary are there questions at the back that would focus you on what's going to be important there they're bold statements is it organized in some specific way the more you know about the text the more you are likely to be able to enter it easily move through it carefully figure out the context pre read a little bit I don't know you don't believe me yet so here's we're gonna do I'm gonna give you a series of numbers from 1 to 100 I want you to find number one I want you to find number two etc get as high as you can I'm only gonna give you 10 seconds fine number one fine number two let's see how how you get in 10 seconds ready go well how did you get most folks in 10 seconds can get to 5 for some get to 7 8 I've had someone get to 10 once before but I think they were fibbing I'm not sure it was true it's hard when you have a chaotic field and for everything you don't know the organization if you don't know who the good players are it's gonna be confusing so let me give you a little pre reading on that number chart I have divided the field into quadrants the top right you'll find number one in the bottom right you'll find number two and then number three and then number four and they go clockwise in coordinates so where one is you'll also find five all I've done is give you a simple organizational pattern to this text I've told you what the chapters are what the themes are what kinds of ideas you should be looking for and now you're ready to count again ten seconds same numbers now they're divided go I bet you did a lot better that time I know you did many people will double their reading and this is why I'm telling you that learning to read with annotation is more efficient you can double your retention you can double what you bring back to you our experience in the classroom in the business world wherever you need to have this experience so what's the strategy the strategy is ask your professor ask yourself even write it out what is my goal how much time am i dedicating to this reading experience gather as much information as you can about the text and then do your reading do your reading with a purpose climb that mountain and while you are climbing the mountain also gather the berries for the pie don't forget to reward yourself now there is a master annotator it's got all the elements I'm talking about a little bit of highlighting a little bit underlining some squares and circles some summary some text here some text there lots of great stuff which brings me to a final point one of the main ideas of annotation is that you figure out what's important to you and you're trying to make it less complicated in some ways this annotation is more complicated and I this was a guy who was working on a PhD so he needed to make it more complicated he had a lot he wanted to work with but that is not necessarily your goal but it's also why you should use a pen or a pencil more than a highlighter because a highlighter everything looks the same but a pen or pencil will allow you to say this is what's important this is the key oh this is not so important it allows you to distinguish between and discriminate among the elements that might be valuable to you you know what I've just taught you is so easy even cats could do it well I guess she couldn't she fell asleep annotation is a system it's a system that you will use for your entire academic experience and that we will use for every element of our time together in our course know your purpose set a goal set a time read annotate and then use the information that you have found let's practice I know we're all worn out from this exciting experience we just had together but let's do a little practice together you are one of your first assignments in our class is to annotate your syllabus that doesn't mean spend half an hour poring over your syllabus trying to remember every bit of it it means setting a watch timer or hour timer on your phone for two minutes establishing a goal the goal is to find two elements that you think are important just to not asking you to find every element two elements that are important