Active reading is to read while taking notes in order to better unde

Active reading is to read while taking notes in order to better
understand what you are reading. Annotating means summarize
and mark up your reading. You will be doing a lot of active
reading and annotating in your college career. You will annotate
articles and chapter readings. In this class, you will annotate
every article you read. You will need the practice, so you will
become better and more critical readers.
Read and take notes over the the two handouts attached: Active
Reading and Annotating Sources.
Download the annotation assignment (in a Word document) over
the essay "Does Fiction Have the Power to Sway Politics"
below.
Read and annotate the article "Does Fiction Have the Power to
Sway Politics."
Save your completed assignment to your computer.
Submit your completed assignment as an attachment by clicking
on the link below for your Writer's Notebook 1.1.
Ten Steps for Active Reading
When you read scholarly articles (see the handout Scholarly
Articles verses Popular Articles for more information about
scholarly articles) or college textbooks, it is important that you
are an active reader and annotate your sources. Annotating is
the art of taking notes about and on an article. Annotating an
essay proves to your instructor and yourself that you fully
understand the concepts within the essay or chapter. Annotating

is the first step in learning and comprehending a subject.
This handout will guide you through the steps you need to take
before, during, and after reading an article.
Before reading the article, read the title and respond.
In the margins or in a notebook, respond to the text based only
on the title. i. What do you think the article is about?
ii. What do you expect the author to address in the article?
In the margins or in a notebook, formulate questions based only
on the title.
Then look up and read the author’s biography (don’t read the
article yet). Sometimes the biography follows the title or is at
the end of the article. If you cannot find the biography on the
actual article, Google the author and read his or her biography.
Skim the article.
Read any section headings or bolded words. If they are short,
read the introduction and conclusion.
In the margins or in a notebook, write down your first
impressions. What do you understand? What do you not
understand?

Read the entire article.
While reading, in the margins or in a notebook, summarize the
point of every paragraph in only 3-5 words. If shortening a
paragraph into 3-5 words is too difficult, write an entire
sentence. The point here is to show that you understand the
main idea of each paragraph before you move onto the next.
While reading, keep a dictionary handy and look up all
unfamiliar words You can download the Dictionary.com app
onto your smart phone for free. Write the definitions of words
you do not know in the margins and create a 3X5 notecard to
help you learn the new word. Keep notecards in the front flap of
your notebook. That way you will stay organized by topic and
class.
After reading the article, annotate the text by highlighting,
underlining, or circling important terms, phrases, or ideas. Be
sure to underline the thesis or main point. Use color to connect
similar ideas or arguments. Do not simply underline or highlight
everything. Be
Handout created by Justine White
www.richlandcollege.edu/englishcorner
boxing,
judicious (if you are actively reading this handout, you will
look up what judicious means) with your annotating, so it will
be helpful when studying, researching, or writing. See the
handout Annotating Sources for more help with how to
annotate.

After reading, in the margins or in a notebook, write down the
author’s argument, supporting ideas, purpose, tone, and
audience. When you can identify these items, you know that you
fully understand the article.
Does knowing the author’s biography help you to understand
the author’s argument? In the margins or in a notebook, write
down any connections between the author’s biography and the
claim.
Finally, when you complete a reading, in the margins or in a
notebook, write down the title and author of other readings from
the same or a different class that relate to the text. Write down
ideas and/or arguments that are similar to or different from the
text to help you make connections across genres and disciplines.
Annotating Sources
During the research phase of writing a research paper, you will
come across numerous sources that can eventually provide
support for claims in your research paper. In order to
understand your sources and be prepared to write, you must take
excellent notes or risk having to constantly reread those
sources. Annotation is the process of writing useful notes in the
margins of a document. If the text doesn’t belong to you or you
can’t write on it, you can take notes in a separate notebook or
on a set of index cards.
How to Annotate
While there are numerous approaches to annotating a source, the
following step-by-step method is a tried-and-true way to get the
most out of your note taking. If you develop a different method,
it is a good idea to include a key at the top of your first

document, so you can remember what the different symbols and
actions mean.
As you read, in the margins or on post-it notes, index cards, or a
separate notebook, summarize each paragraph in one sentence.
Don’t use complete sentences, just jot down the main idea. If
you use abbreviations for words that you may not remember, be
sure to include these in your key at the top of the document.
When you annotate a longer text, group paragraphs together that
cover the same subject and summarize these collectively instead
of each paragraph on its own.
Read the entire document without a highlighter in your hand.
Just summarize each paragraph as you read. You’ll begin
“marking up” the text after you read it.
After you have read the text, number each paragraph. This will
help you make quick references to various parts of the text
without having to write out sentences or paragraphs in your
notes.
Once you have numbered your paragraphs, use a highligh ter to
mark the thesis for the entire text. Please see the handout
Reading Comprehension for further information on identifying
thesis statements.
Draw a box around any counterarguments you come across. If
you are unsure how to identify a counterargument, please see
the handout Counterargument and Refutations for additional
information.
Underline supporting details in pen or pencil or highlight these
in a different color highlighter than you used to identify the
thesis.

If you have trouble understanding any portion of the text, write
a question mark beside that section, so you can ask questions in
class or with a tutor.
Circle any vocabulary words you do not know and write down
their definitions.
Respond to the text in the margins or on a sticky note next to
the appropriate section.
Also, if part of a text reminds you of another text, make note of
this as well.
10.When a text presents a complex argument, you may find it
helpful to develop a “road
map” of the text by using a squiggly-line under the topic
sentences for each paragraph or sections of paragraphs to trace
out the argument. You will have a visual depiction of how the
text connects (you can follow this approach in a notebook by
using paragraph/line numbers).
Handout created by Topher Garay & Justine White
www.richlandcollege.edu/englishcorner
Tools for Annotation
Whenever you set out to annotate a text, you should make sure
you have the necessary tools in order to take effective notes.
The following list contains useful items for annotations:
Different colored pencils, pens, or highlighters
. Be sure to identify what each color represents in your key at

the top of the document or the top of your corresponding
notebook.
Post-it notes or reference tabs
. These are especially helpful when you need to annotate a
library book or some other document that you cannot write in.
Instead of highlighting, place an appropriately colored reference
tab next to the part you would otherwise underline or highlight.
You can also write down summaries, questions, and other
comments on post-it notes and place these next to the
corresponding parts in the text.
A notebook
. Keeping a notebook dedicated to a specific research project
can help you to keep your notes organized. This can also be
helpful when the margins of the text do not provide enough
room to write your summaries, questions, and other comments.
Use the paragraph numbers to identify where your notes in the
notebook would fit.
Index cards
. If you come across difficult vocabulary, use index cards to
write down the definitions of these terms. You can later use
these index cards to refresh your memory of the definitions of
these terms and begin to make them your own.
Symbols and shapes
. Another approach to specifying what each part of your notes
mean is to use different shapes or symbols to indicate certain
types of annotations. For example, you could use a triangle
beside or around text to indicate key statistics or other forms of
data.

Read and take notes over the article "Does Fiction Have the
Power to Sway Politics?" (link above).
Review and take notes over the handouts Annotating Sources
and Ten Steps for Active Reading that are above.
Complete the annotating activity in your next Writer's Notebook
assignment below.
Does Fiction Have the Power to Sway Politics?
By
Mohsin Hamid
and
Francine Prose
Feb. 17, 2015
28
Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the
world of books. This week, Mohsin Hamid and Francine Prose
debate literature’s influence on politics.
By Mohsin Hamid

Fiction can say publicly what might otherwise appear
unsayable.
Mohsin HamidCreditIllustration by R. Kikuo Johnson
The line between fiction and nonfiction is more blurry than
many people like to admit. Sometimes, political writing that
claims to be nonfiction is actually fiction. The political power
of such fiction-as-nonfiction is undeniable: “The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion” stoked the fires of European anti -Semitism
in the decades before the Holocaust; American news coverage
of the Gulf of Tonkin incident facilitated the escalation of
American military involvement in Vietnam; supposedly true
accounts about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction contributed
to the disastrous invasion of that country 12 years ago.
The power of fictions that admit to being fiction, such as
novels, may seem to pale in comparison. There are exceptions,
of course: In popular lore, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle
Tom’s Cabin” is said to have hardened opposition to slavery,
thereby helping set in motion the war that led to slavery’s
abolition.
Most novels aren’t directly credited with starting wars. Yet
fiction still instigates change. Fiction can say publicly what
might otherwise appear unsayable, combating the coerced
silence that is a favored weapon of those who have power. In
Pakistan, for example, where numerous hatreds — including of
Hindus, of atheists, of supposed sexual transgressors — have
been actively promoted by the state for purposes of social
control, we have seen Hindu characters, nonbelieving
characters, sexually transgressive characters being humanized in
fiction.
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Over half a century ago, Saadat Hasan Manto lampooned
religious and nationalistic bigotry in Pakistan, opening up
political and creative space for so many Pakistani writers,
myself included, to enter. Reading his acerbic, wanton,
irreverent short stories for the first time, I thought: “Wait, you
can write that?” It was an electric experience for me, like
reading James Baldwin and Toni Morrison would be, like
reading Chinua Achebe would be.
I encountered Achebe in my final year of high school in Lahore,
the sole African writer on our syllabus. “Things Fall Apart”
forced me to grapple with how infantilizing the experience of
colonialism must have been — how it killed off the adulthood
of generations of parents, made children of them, made the
colonizer into the adult, the colonized into the children of
children. It was the only assigned novel I can remember my
friends and myself talking about incessantly after school.
Politics is shaped by people. And people, sometimes, are shaped
by the fiction they read. After Manto, I was more aware of the
dangerous social desiccation being imposed in the name of
religion around me in Pakistan. After Achebe, I was more
concerned with agency, the notion that we Pakistanis needed to
take responsibility for solving our own problems, because
blaming the outside world, even when partly justified, served
only to perpetuate our own sense of powerlessness.
I also read George Orwell’s “1984” around this time. The Berlin
Wall fell the year I graduated from high school, and so it
seemed to me that Orwell had gotten things wrong, that his
dystopia, no matter how believably chilling, could never be
humanity’s future. I associated “1984” with life behind the Iron
Curtain. Only later, living in London in the noughties, an era of
Bush-Blair doublethink and perpetual “war on terror,” did it
occur to me that Orwell’s novel was set not in Russia but in
Britain, and that perhaps the only reason his terrifying vision of

society had been prevented from coming fully into existence
was that he had already warned us — for otherwise the
tendencies to slip into his nightmare were everywhere to be
seen.
Does fiction affect politics? Yes, inevitably. So is all fiction
political? To my mind, yes again. Fiction writers who claim
their writing is not political are simply writers who seek to
dissociate themselves from the politics furthered by their
writing. Making up stories is an inherently political act. Like
voting is. And like choosing not to vote is, too.
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Mohsin Hamid
is the author of three novels: “Moth Smoke,” a finalist for the
PEN/Hemingway Award; “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” a
New York Times best seller that was shortlisted for the Man
Booker Prize and adapted for film; and “How to Get Filthy Rich
in Rising Asia,” a winner of the Terzani Prize. His latest book
is an essay collection, “Discontent and its Civilizations.”

◆◆◆
By Francine Prose
Perhaps the clearest case of literature effecting political change
is Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.”
Francine ProseCreditIllustration by R. Kikuo Johnson
Poetry makes nothing happen, Auden wrote, but occasionally
fiction can get things done. Sadly, it’s easier to chart the ways
in which literature has changed politics for the worse than to
make a case for its positive effect on the course of human
events. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and “The Turner
Diaries” have confirmed bigots in their bigotry and made new
converts to the cause of racism and intolerance. The sacred texts
of most religions (let’s call them narratives and leave others to
debate the question whether they are fact or fiction) have been
used to justify unspeakable violence.
But can fiction change history for the better? Many of us have
heard how Abraham Lincoln asked Harriet Beecher Stowe if she
was the little lady whose big book started the great war. But the
story is most likely apocryphal: a literary urban legend.
Doubtless Stowe’s popular novel helped persuade its readers
that slaves were human beings with feelings like those of their
masters. But neither Lincoln nor Stowe could seriously have
believed that her novel had functioned as an actual call to arms.
Interestingly, I know of no similar stories about the authors of
celebrated antiwar novels; apparently no one imagines a world
leader telling Stephen Crane or Erich Maria Remarque that he
would surely have declared war if not for “The Red Badge of
Courage” or “All Quiet on the Western Front.”
Perhaps the clearest case of literature effecting political change
is that of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel “The Jungle.” Its

disgusting portrait of the meatpacking industry rapidly led to
the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and
Drug Act. So what if Sinclair had hoped that his work would
end the oppressive conditions under which industry workers
labored rather than merely improving the quality of the protein
on middle-class tables?
But while it’s difficult to trace the direct — the quid pro quo —
impact of literature on politics, it’s encouraging (certainly for
writers) to suggest that our books can change how readers
interact with their fellow humans. Fiction can (though by no
means is it required to) enable us to see the world through the
eyes of people unlike ourselves and view them more
empathetically; such changes may make us more likely to favor
the creation of a more humane society. A 2013 study reported in
The New York Times found that “after reading literary fiction,
as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction, people
performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception
and emotional intelligence.”
Though the novels of Charles Dickens failed to radically
improve the lot of poor children in Victorian England, they did
raise public awareness of the Oliver Twists and Little Dorrits
whom readers might otherwise have ignored: children suffering
the humiliations that Dickens endured when, as a child, he
worked in a boot-blacking factory and his father was sent to the
debtors’ prison. In an essay on John Ruskin, George Eliot wrote
that “in making clear to ourselves what is best and noblest in
art, we are making clear to ourselves what is best and noblest in
morals; in learning how to estimate the artistic products of a
particular age, . . . we are widening our sympathy and
deepening the basis of our tolerance and charity.”
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Certainly George Eliot can make us more charitable and patient.
My long literary acquaintance with the Rev. Edward Casaubon,
Dorothea Brooke’s pedantic husband in “Middlemarch,” has
made me far more forgiving of the handful of Casaubons I’ve
met in life. I always think, “Hey, that guy’s not just a pompous
idiot, he’s a sad, self-deluding mess, like Edward Casaubon!”
Medical students have been advised to read works such as
Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” on the theory that these
masterpieces will help them see “cases” as “people” and treat
them accordingly. After reading Chekhov, I feel, however
briefly, that we are all suffering humans, deserving of sympathy
and tenderness. Who knows how our social and political lives
might change if we were all persuaded to read at least one
Chekhov story each day?
Francine Prose
is the author of 20 works of fiction and nonfiction, among them
the novel “Blue Angel,” a National Book Award nominee, and
the guide “Reading Like a Writer,” a New York Times best
seller. Her new novel is “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris
1932.” Currently a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College,
she is the recipient of numerous grants and awards; a
contributing editor at Harper’s, Saveur and Bomb; a former
president of the PEN American Center; and a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Annotation Assignment

Please complete the following steps to annotate and submit the
attached reading assignment.
Download the Microsoft Word file (or PDF if you want to hand
annotate or see the original version).
Annotate the article. Turn on Track Changes in Microsoft Word
under the Review tab first.
Complete Step 1: Predict and Preview before you read.
Read a paragraph and then summarize (paraphrase) it in
one sentence
. In Microsoft Word, highlight the last word in the paragraph,
and then click the Comment box and type your summary in the
box.
Define all vocabulary words you don't know. Type the
definition directly in the sentence next to the word.
Highlight the main ideas in the text and underline the
supporting details or interesting quotes/facts (annotate).
Complete the reading questions at the end.
Save your file onto your computer with the completed questions
and annotations.
Resubmit your completed assignment by clicking on the link
above and attaching your file.

You have two choices when completing this assignment. You
can use the Track Changes in Microsoft Word to answer the
questions and annotate, or you can download and print the PDF
and hand write directly on the article. Be sure you also
download the Word file, so you know what the reading
questions are at the end of the article. Then you can take a
picture of your annotations and submit them when you are
finished.
Grading rubric:
Pre-reading 10
Summaries 40
Vocabulary 10
Annotating 20
Two post questions 20
Total 100
Annotation Assignment

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