Summary and Close Reading

During the past two weeks, I have learned a lot of things such as how to appropriately annotate, how to do reflective analytical writing, and how to change my mind to be creative and engaged with ideas in the readings. Our course objective states that we are going to "practice metacognitive reading of a variety of texts, both public discourse and academic discourse" and "develop habits for engaged reading" (Haas). In my learnings of this week, I developed the habit to annotate when I was reading. And there are some quotes from my assignments: "it’s an over $250 billion a year industry, just in the United States” (Kilbourne 2:51-2:53) and “Exercise was her appetizer, fast food her main course” (Kilbourne 20:21-20:24). The quotes above are from the assignment of annotating a film called Killing Us Softly 4. In this film, Jean Kilbourne talks a lot about how society construct women's preferable traits. She gives some specific example like fast food advertisements I quoted above to illustrate the opinion that genes make some people thinner than others. There is nothing those products and diet can do to really lose weight. Annotation is a good way to remember things when I was reading. It can also help me to recall some details many days after which is convenient.

In an assignment "close reading practice," I learned how to develop a habit for engaged reading by predicting the main idea before reading, reading to find the main idea, asking questions and criticizing, making connections and so on. For instance, I quote “a beautiful woman suffers because of circumstances out of her control and ultimately finds salvation in the love of a powerful man” (Haas and Trapdeo) from the article Looking into the Magic Mirror because it helps me to understand one sub idea of the article. The main idea is that Disney films has a big impact on social construction of gender roles and women's traits. By using methods of engaged reading, I found a way to get away from wandering and roughly reading to the end with no idea about what the author talks about. It will be more helpful if I am reading a long passage because I will be more focused when I am trying to find the main idea to see if my prediction of the main idea is right.

By doing the weekly exploratory writing, I found many flaws in my writing by reading my paragraphs again and again and see peer review of other students in this class. I think I am on my way to fulfill the course objective of "feel confident of your reading accuracy," "understand the importance of peer review to the composing process and develop effective peer review skills" and "understand the importance of self-review" (Haas). I am looking forward to see what I will end up doing. Moreover, seeing me developing many useful skills is so exciting and wonderful. I will continue to do engaged reading and self-review in this course and in the future.