Discussing “What Is It about 20-Something?”

As the semester continues, I feel as though my annotating skills have gotten much better. At the beginning of the semester I tended to annotate just to understand key ideas in the text. Now, I am still annotating to help me understand but also asking questions, challenging the author, and drawing relationships between this text and myself or other texts. In Henig’s article, “What Is It about 20-Something?”, I noticed my annotating skills were improving. I started off just annotating to understand but as the article progressed, I began to relate it to a TEDTalk we watched in class as well as annotating my personal opinion. I also asked questions that pushed for a better understanding. To better understand what I mean when I say my annotations have greatly approved, I will link my first ever annotations to this post. These annotations prove that I did not grasp the critical thinking skills to use annotation to improve my understanding of a piece. Although I have improved my annonating skills, it was very hard because by forcing yourself to focus only on the text and think logically about the text and the outside world can be very difficult. Due to this I still have room for improvement by challenging the text more and asking more critical questions. 

Although reading and annotating help me understand the text better, another way that helps me understand is by writing a short paragraph after the text. This way, I can write about what I understand from the text and relate back to it if I ever have to discuss ideas and situations in the text. Being able to think critically about the text and relate it to myself as well as other texts helps me to understand what I am reading more. In my paragraph from Henig, I wrote about a concept in the text and how I felt about it and how it related to me. I now have a better understanding of “What Is It about 20-Something?” because I had the ability to relate it to myself.