Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking.

Reading and retaining the information is something I have always struggled on to this day. It’s hard for me to read something then be able to immediately remember and have an understanding of what the author is saying. Especially, if I’m reading about something that doesn’t have any interest to me.

Here, I wasn’t grasping the reading too much. I struggled keeping focus and finding thoughts I was having to write down while reading this. I make small observations but none of which give me understanding of what I’m reading.

Although this doesn’t show my improvement of how to annotate readings since Konnikova’s was before Bloom’s, it still shows an improvement of my ability to engage in a reading. It’s the difference of my interest in the reading that affects my active reading. There are five active reading techniques are understanding, questioning, relating, challenging, and rhetorical. Learning this definitely helped a lot whenever I was having a hard time grasping what I was reading. Before taking ENG110, I didn’t annotate at all besides highlighting certain things that stood out to me. After learning to use these techniques I was able to better my comprehension of what I was reading.

This is a sample of a response question I had to answer after reading Maria Konnikova’s, “The Limits of Friendship”. The question I was tasked to answer here was to explain what I believed the Dunbar number and rule of three to be in my own words. By annotating the text it helped spark ideas to how I would be answering the reading response questions. This specific question was very useful when writing my essay because I was able to put in my own words what the Dunbar number meant and how it affected me. Without this reading response question, I would have found it much more difficult to understand what exactly Konnikova meant when she mentioned the Dunbar number and rule of three. It also would have been harder to come up with ideas for being able to tie her reading to both the prompt and my own thoughts.