Overview: Annotating a Text

Examining how and why the creator of a work forges connections and what they may mean constitutes a huge part of what literary scholarship involves. In order to begin to consider how the writer establishes connections, we want not only to read the text but to engage with it, and we do this through a close reading and annotation of the text. When you annotate a text, you are, essentially, beginning to identify and/or make connections with the words on the page. You should think of making the texts yours: write on the text and “mark it up.”  in other words, note anything that seems important to you: a notable word choice, for example, or an interesting tone of voice, or a connection you see developing. In short, while most of us do these very things (often silently) as we read, you goal with annotating a text is to make a physical record of such reactions to what you are reading.

Why Annotate? 

Annotating the text helps you think more deeply about the work, and your notes can be extremely useful, providing placeholders, reminders, or signposts for you to return to as you read, when you discuss, and when you begin to engage in the initial stages of discovering and exploring what others have said about the work. Any valid argument (whether spoken aloud as part of a class discussion or written as an essay) about a work of literature should be grounded in its text. You will need to support your points with specific quotations (or summary or paraphrase), and those points will need to be valid not only with the use of specific textual material but also with the entire story taken into consideration. In other words, the better you remember specific places in the text that strike you, the better you’ll be able to think about how they work within the text as a whole.

From Annotating to Close Reading: An Example

To illustrate such skills in using textual specifics (often called “close reading’), and the writing that such a reading method can produce, I am copying below a paragraph from an essay relevant to our course: Caitlin Stone’s “Lost and Found; The Fall of Grace in ‘Sonny’s Blues.'”

      Despite Sonny’s spiral toward destruction, the greater example of a loss
of grace is paradoxically found in his brother, the narrator. The narrator, a
successful, “moral” man compared to those around him, cannot abide his
own brother’s failing, and this leads to an inability to extend grace to others.
This is particularly evident when an old friend of Sonny’s meets the narrator
at the school where he works and talks to him about his incarcerated brother.
The friend feels partly responsible for Sonny’s drug addiction and, coupled
with his own misery, it leads him to contemplate, “[I]f I was smart, I’d have
reached for a pistol a long time ago” (125). The narrator’s only response is
for him not to “tell me your sad story. If it was up to me, I’d give you one.”
Although in the next sentence the narrator reflects that he “felt guilty . . . for
never having supposed that the poor bastard had a story of his own” (125),
he never apologizes or goes back on his remark.

Notice, in the above excerpt, how the author interweaves textual details/quotations from the text (sometimes a single word, sometimes a sentence, sometimes a carefully-chosen block quote) with the interpretation  and analysis of those details? Look at the sentence that begins with “the friend feels” for a particularly good example. In that sentence, we see the author BOTH offering an interpretation (that word “feels” is inherently subjective, and thus the author needs to explain it) AND at the same time incorporating the textual evidence that support the claim (“if I was smart,” etc.) That’s the fundamental move in the vital literary analysis method called close reading. What results is a BOTH that the author makes no unsupported claims, and at the same time avoids extensive quoting that can leave the reader asking for context and interpretation.

Close Reading, Going Forward in this Course

With the above in mind, as you read (and later write) for this course, look both at the text’s story, plot, themes, etc, and at the words the author uses to further that story. What specifics can you refer to that bolster your claims? Keep a running reference of those specifics, and call on them liberally as you write your essays, responses, etc.

To begin a close reading and annotations of any piece of literature, consider the following questions (please note: many of the terms included below are discussed within the chapters dedicated to each genre):

• What genre is this piece of literature classified as, and are there specific elements unique to that genre to consider as you read and annotate?
• What structural elements do you observe as you read?
• Are characters present? If so, who are the main and who are the supporting characters, and how are they developed? Are they flat and/or static, or are they round and/or dynamic? Do certain characters serve as foils for the main character, and if they do, what is revealed by comparing and contrasting these characters?
• Where is the action set, and why might this be important?
• Who (or what) is the speaker or narrator? Is the narrator reliable or unreliable?
• What is the plot? What is the main conflict?
• Are there images or symbols that seem significant because of where they appear and/or how frequently the author incorporates them? Are they “universal” symbols or ones that have meaning only within the bounds of this piece of literature?

Making these observations will help you to begin the dive that may eventually lead to your constructing a particular argument about the text.

Sources:

Stone, Caitlin. “Lost and Found: The Fall of Grace in SONNY’S BLUES.” The Explicator, vol. 74, no. 4, 2013, pp. 251-254, DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2013.841636.