Annotating a Text

Textual annotations are notes in the margins of a text (they’re also called marginalia). They serve many functions, including: (1) clarifying, asking questions about the author’s intentions or meanings; (2) explicating key words or ideas, defining how the words or phrases are being used in the context of this argument; (3) framing, providing important history about the time in which the author is writing or relationships to when you are reading; (4) generated from a reader’s own idiosyncratic response to a text—for example, quotations and passages from the text the reader wishes to collect and remember, and put in dialogue with one another.

 For your first assignment, you will carefully annotate approximately two pages of text from our recent readings, selecting from:

• Robert Cover, “Nomos and Narrative”
  • (If you are annotating Cover, don’t select any passages reviewed in our section meetings.)
• Jeremy Bentham, “The Principles of Morals and Legislation” 
• Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”

In selecting your text, be sure to identify material that is both compelling and challenging to you and your thinking. As you read, make as many annotations as is helpful to your comprehension and engagement, but do be sure that you have included at least three different kinds of annotations (as outlined above) in your examination of the material. Your annotations should be honest—acknowledging what needs clarifying—and thoughtful—deeply considering what the text is offering and how you might generously approach it. You will bring those annotated pages to an individual meeting with your section leader, which you will have scheduled by September 12th. At that meeting, you will discuss your observations about the text, the kinds of annotations that are serving your reading, and the ways in which you are making meaning from the annotative process.

Once you have met with your section leader, you will expand upon three of those annotations (choosing three different types) into paragraphs that grapple with the connections between those annotations and the larger ideas in the reading, such that they  consider both the content of the reading and the ideas that emerge from your annotations.

You will submit your final writing to a designated folder on our course moodle page. Please also include a PDF or JPEG of your annotations.

Make a meeting with section leader by: Friday, Sept 12, 5pm

Paragraphs due by: Friday, Sept 26, 5pm

Submission Guidelines