Week 2: Annotation, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing Study Notes

Learning Outcomes for Week $2$

• Setting a Reading Purpose: Understanding how to establish a clear objective before beginning to read a text.
• Cognitive Strategies for Understanding: How to utilize annotation, paraphrasing, and summarizing techniques to improve comprehension of complex materials.

Purposeful Reading and Establishing Intent

• The Nature of Reading: Reading is inherently purposeful. The specific method used to read a text depends entirely on the reader's objective. Different types of texts require different reading approaches.
• Everyday Reading vs. Academic Reading: In daily life, reading is often driven by a specific question (e.g., looking for sports results or television schedules in a newspaper). Readers typically navigate directly to the relevant section rather than reading from the first page.
• Benefits of Purposeful Reading: Having a clearly defined purpose makes understanding easier because the reader knows exactly what information they are seeking.
• Consequences of Lack of Purpose: According to Tovani in the book I Read It, But I Don't Get It, readers without a purpose often experience several negative cognitive states ($2000, p. 24$):     * Daydreaming.     * Inability to stay focused.     * Inability to relate to the topic.     * Boredom.
• Types of Reading Purposes:     * Gaining a better understanding of a concept.     * Making personal connections to the text.     * Gaining specific facts or information.     * Solving a mystery or answering a specific question.     * Extracting information for assessment purposes.

Core Reading Strategies

• Scanning: Reading at high speed to locate specific pieces of information (e.g., searching for a phone number in a directory).
• Skimming: Reading quickly while skipping over details to obtain the general gist or an overview of the content. This is commonly used when browsing books or deciding on relevant material.     * The Skimming Process:         1. Read the chapter title.         2. Read the headings of subsections.         3. Read the first and last sentences of paragraphs.         4. Read the first and last paragraph of the entire chapter.     * Reasons for Skimming: To save time and to identify if material is relevant to the reader's needs.
• Study Reading: Reading with high levels of care and concentration specifically to learn from and retain the text.
• Critical Reading: Reading with the intent to compare different sources or evaluate varying points of view.

Techniques for Making Notes While Reading

• Active Engagement Strategies:     * Annotating (making notes in the margins).     * Extracting main ideas from every paragraph.     * Underlining unfamiliar terminology and difficult words.     * Paraphrasing (translating phrases into personal language).     * Identifying discourse markers or "signposts" (e.g., "however," "in addition," "for example").

Comprehensive Annotation Methodology

• Vocabulary Management: Underline unfamiliar words and provide definitions for them at the bottom of the page.
• Page Summaries: Write a brief summary of the events or ideas on a single page at the top of that page. These should be concise, ideally no more than $5$ words.
• Tracking Themes: Use the back cover of the text to record themes, motifs, and symbols, alongside the page numbers where they appear.
• Margin Notes: Maintain at least one note in the side margin of every page. These notes should represent personal connections being made by the reader.
• Benefits of Annotation:     * Allows readers of all levels to easily return to a text and find key points.     * Keeps readers focused on the track of the argument.     * Forces a slower reading pace, which provides more time for connections and comprehension to occur.
• Visual Annotation Symbols:     * Underline: Unfamiliar words.     * Arrows ($\rightarrow$): Used to show relationships between different ideas.     * Numbered Lists ($1, 2, 3$): To mark steps, lists, or specific details.     * Jotting Questions (?): To indicate areas of confusion in the margin.     * Exclamation Points (!): To note ideas the reader disagrees with.     * Asterisks (): To highlight important ideas.      LOL: To mark humorous content.

Workplace/Practical Annotation Example

• Observation/Text Analysis: High school is described as potentially "brutal" (cruel) due to excessive testing and surveillance.
• Key Annotations Noted:     * "excess of" = too much.     * "testing and watchfulness" = observation.     * "big eyeball of the system" = society.     * "omnipresent" = present everywhere.     * "virtual concrete of electrons" = tangible reality/online forever.

Understanding Academic Texts

• Characteristics of Academic Writing:     * Centered on abstract questions, issues, and conceptual ideas.     * Presents objective facts and evidence to support claims.     * Uses logical reasoning to construct and defend arguments.     * Follows a clearly defined and consistent structure.     * Employs carefully chosen language to maximize effectiveness.     * Functions as a persuasive tool to convince readers of a specific position.
• Reader Responsibilities in Academic Contexts: Readers must go beyond simple summarization and are expected to:     * Recognize the author's purpose and identify potential bias.     * Distinguish between objective facts and the author's subjective opinions.     * Challenge assumptions that are questionable or claims that lacks support.     * Project the possible consequences of the author's claims.     * Integrate information across multiple different sources.     * Detect contradictions or competing viewpoints within or between texts.     * Evaluate evidence to draw independent conclusions rather than accepting the author's claims at face value.

Paraphrasing: Definition and Practice

• Definition: Seligmann ($2012: 293$) defines paraphrasing as using one's own words to report the material or ideas of another person. It is a rewording of a writer's text, narrative, or explanation.
• The Goal: To state the original writer's ideas in the reader's own unique language.
• Benefits of Paraphrasing:     * Forces the reader to understand difficult texts because you cannot put into your own words what you do not understand.     * Eliminates the temptation to skip hard passages or simply memorize them.     * Demonstrates mastery and understanding of the original text.     * Protects against plagiarism.

Steps for Effective Paraphrasing

1. Overview: Skim the text to understand the general context.
2. Identification: Pinpoint specific parts of the text that require paraphrasing.
3. Scope: Focus on paraphrasing short sections of text at a time.
4. Deep Reading: Read and re-read the specific sentence or short paragraph until the full meaning is understood.
5. Rewriting: Without looking at the original text, rewrite the information.
6. Substitution and Restructuring: Use synonyms where possible and change the grammatical structure of the original sentence.

Comparative Paraphrasing Example

• Original Text (Robbins et al $2003, p. 138$): "A business firm's obligation, beyond that required by the law and economics, is to pursue long-term goals that are good for society."
• Successful Paraphrase: "Business should focus on objectives that are not only legal and financially appropriate, but are of long range benefit to society."     * Changes Made: The sentence structure was altered, and key words were replaced with synonyms (e.g., "obligation" to "focus on objectives"; "long-term goals" to "long range benefit").

Identifying Plagiarism in Paraphrasing

• Source Text (Thurow, L. $1993$, p. $6$): "Because of their unique perspective, Americans fear globalization less than anyone else, and as a consequence they think about it less than anyone else. When Americans do think about globalization, they think of the global economy as an enlarged version of the American economy."
• Plagiarized Version: According to Thurow ($1993$) Americans fear globalization less than people from other countries and as a consequence spend less time thinking about it. Indeed, Americans see globalization as an enlarged version of their own economy.
• Why it is Plagiarism:     * The writer used Thurow's exact wording without quotation marks.     * The writer only substituted occasional synonyms rather than rewriting the structure.     * Even though a citation was provided, the lack of structural change and quotation marks makes it plagiarism.

Summarizing Academic Texts

• Purpose: To shorten a text by extracting only the primary ideas and major supporting details. It can be applied to texts of any length, from single paragraphs to entire books.
• Plagiarism Prevention: A summary must be written in the words of the person summarizing as much as possible.
• Reasons to Summarize:     * To highlight main points.     * To reduce long texts to manageable lengths.     * To aid in learning content.     * To gather information for research papers and assignments.     * To speed up revision for exams and tests.     * To improve reading skills by identifying important information.

Methodology for Summarizing

1. Survey the Text: Identify the topic using headings, sub-headings, graphics, and introductory/concluding paragraphs.
2. Section Identification: Identify major divisions to confirm the main points.
3. Interactive Reading: Annotate and highlight main points as you go.
4. Paragraph Notes: Make a brief note for each individual paragraph.
5. Synthesis: Combine the individual paragraph notes into new paragraphs. Ensure each new paragraph contains only one main idea.

Rules for Summarizing

• Technical Terms: Do not attempt to paraphrase technical terms; keep them as they are.
• Objectivity: Do not include personal comments or evaluations.
• Verification: Read the summary against the original text to ensure the author's meaning has not been distorted.

The Language of Summaries (Reporting Verbs)

• Function: The choice of reporting verb indicates the summary writer’s stance or the strength of the original author's argument.
• Common Reporting Phrases:     * "The author asserts / maintains / argues / states / claims / declares / insists / says…"     * "According to the writer…"     * "Based on evidence from relevant research, the writer believes…"     * "In this text, the writer…"