Why Annotate and Freewrite?
Whatever your reasons for writing about fiction, a number of things happen when you do. First, in writing about a novel or story you tend to read it more attentively, noticing things you might overlook in a more casual reading. Second, because writing stimulates thinking, when you write about fiction you find yourself thinking more about what a particular work means and why you respond to it as you do. This focused thinking often has the effect of making a literary work more meaning to you.
When you write about a novel or short story, you may write for yourself or you may write for others. Writing for yourself, writing to discover what you think, often takes casual forms such as annotation and freewriting. These informal kinds of writing are useful for helping you focus. They are helpful in studying for tests about fiction. They can serve also as preliminary forms of writing when you write more formal essays and papers about fiction.
Annotation
When you annotate a text, you make notes in the margins or at the top and bottom of pages. Annotations can also be made within the text, as underlined words, circled phrases, and bracketed sentences or paragraphs. Annotations may also assume the form of arrows, question marks, and various other marks.
Annotating a literary work offers a convenient and relatively painless way to begin writing about it. Annotating can get you started zeroing in on what you think interesting or important. You can also annotate to flag details that puzzle or disconcert you.
Your markings serve to focus your attention and clarify you understanding of a story or novel. Your annotations can save you time in rereading or studying a work.
Freewriting
Freewriting is a kind of informal writing you do for yourself. In freewriting you explore a text to find out what you think about it and how you respond to it. When you freewrite you do not know ahead of time what your idea or your responses to the work will be. Instead you write about the work to see where your thinking leads you.
Freewriting leads you to explore your memories and experience as well as aspects of the text itself. You sometimes wander from the details of the story or novel you are writing about. in the process you may discover thoughts and feelings you didn't know you had or were only dimly aware of.
Focused freewriting is very much like making journal entries. Keeping an informal log or journal of your responses to the literary works you read is a useful and fairly easy way to prepare for class discussion of them.
"Annotation." Wikipedia.
"Freewriting." Wikipedia.
Published by Stephenson Chea
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