Our goal with this exercise is to become more conscious of the features of our initial reactions to the things we read (or watch, play, eat, etc.). For the most part, we can think of our initial responses as falling into five categories, described briefly below:
- observation: a specific feature that is objectively present in the text. In other words, no reasonable person would contest its existence.
- question: pretty self-explanatory; a question that emerges while you’re reading/watching/playing or after you’ve thought about it for a little while.
- claim: This is something that a person could disagree with. It is most often an interpretation of something you have observed.
- anecdote: If the thing you’ve read or watched reminds you of something from your own life, this could be called a personal anecdote.
- context: If you looked up a word or researched a concept, you are supplying context.
By categorizing your response to the assigned reading, you can begin to recognize how the things you’re already thinking can be refined into a complex and arguable claim.
I’ve created two ways for you to complete this exercise. If you chose to create annotations in Hypothesis while reading, I encourage you to complete this activity using Hypothesis (using the link to the reading available in Canvas). You can also complete this activity in our shared word online document. The Hypothesis track will allow us to peruse categories most easily using the tags feature, but we’ll be able to see everyone’s work in the shared word online document as well.
Which Track?
Hypothesis Track
- In the annotation page, search for your last name and hit enter to isolate your own annotations.
- Read through all of your own annotations and select at least five to categorize (or all if you like). Do this by adding one or more of the tags listed above. Note: try your best to use the same spelling and capitalization as I have in the bulleted list above for the category names. As is the case for social media hashtags (see #HurricaneHarvery), misspellings can throw things off course.
- If you can’t decide on a category, add a single question mark (?) as a tag.
- Collate: Under each of the categories below your name in our shared Word Online document, include the commentary you categorized in this way.
- Add new thoughts: If this prompts you to add new material to any of your categories, please do!
Shared Word Online Doc Track
- Read through your entire response and select at least five distinct points you made to type or copy/paste into our shared word online document. Including all of the points you made is great if you want to do that.
- Next, categorize each point by inserting comments in your list. Remember that a single point might be a combination of more than one of our categories.
- If one of the categories above doesn’t seem to work, put a “?”
- Collate: Under each of the categories below your name in our shared Word Online document, include the commentary you categorized in this way.
- Add new thoughts: If this prompts you to add new material to any of your categories, please do!
