My approach to active, critical reading is to use annotations to remind me of what is happening in the text. I paraphrase it and try to make notes for myself of what I agree with and disagree with to serve as a roadmap for myself when I go to look at the text again. I use annotations as sort of a dump for all my feelings and thoughts about what the author is claiming and to help me think and learn about a text. I think this is a good example of what Gilroy says annotating does, it puts you into a dialogue with an author and with the issues and ideas you encounter in a text. I definitely think I use it as a way to record the ongoing conversation with myself about the content and to determine my relationship with the text, whether I agree with the ideas or not and how I interpret some of its claims. I think the best example of this is in my annotations specifically in my margin notes where I try to summarize, make sense of, and follow the reading. I decided to mark all the places that had important ideas, where I disagreed with the opinions, or where I felt summarization was necessary. I think this tells me that my ability to “interrogate” readings, as Gilroy puts it, is there but not fully developed. With more practice, I feel I could more extensively annotate and have a conversation with the texts. I feel like I do not have an approach to the informal responses and I think I just try to answer them to the best of my ability while trying not to go too in depth or be too general.

Informal reading response evidence can be found here