During week two of this course, one assignment that I was able to focus a course objective on was the Close Reading Practice: Looking into the Magic Mirror assignment. While reading this essay, I made inferences, posed questions, wrote annotations, and reflected upon the text. This connects to the objective of, “Improve your written literacy, digital literacy, and overall communication skills across several media”(Haas). The two points of this objective that I focused on during this assignment was annotations and reflective analytical writing. While using these techniques while analyzing the text, I felt a high engagement level and an increased understanding of the text. After annotating and reading the entire essay, I wrote a reflective paragraph on what I had learned and thought was important. This helped me to realize the importance of writing a reflection after reading a piece of text. I was able to look back at the techniques I used to write and even think of ways to improve my efficiency and understanding for the next time I read any literary piece. When I finished my reflection for the assignment, I could see what areas I focused on and looked back at. This helped me to understand what parts that I should focus on rather than using all my time on a few categories. For example, in this assignment I focused mainly on making connections and identifying excerpts on beauty/gender roles. In the future, I know to focus on being curious about the text and asking more questions about it.
This image below is of the reflection that I wrote for the essay, Looking into the Magic Mirror.
Hi Jenny! Reading your reflection process about how you decided to analyze the article was interesting because I, too, have to go in order. I definitely think these strategies help make a big essay easier to understand because it allows me to think about each section.
Hi, Jenny! I really appreciate your comments about the Close Reading Practice: Looking into the Magic Mirror assignment. I just had the same experience as you that when I finished the reflection of these strategies, I could go over all the reflections that I did and this process really helped a lot to find my weakness on some writing skills or the reading strategies and improve them effectively.
Hello Jenny,
I too wrote about the same course objective and that annotating was very helpful. I think it is good to focus on the main topics and not categories that may not be as useful to understand the text.