There's a fairly simple annotation technique we teach all of our high school students. - Underline big ideas you come across. - Circle important words or phra

There's a fairly simple annotation technique we teach all of our high school students. - Underline big ideas you come across. - Circle important words or phrases. - Write any questions you have in the margins, as you read. The goal is to have a "conversation with the text" in your head. If you do this well, the process of annotating fades into the background, and just becomes part of how you read. When you go back to that book or section later on, you can quickly get a sense of what stood out to you the first time you read the text. The long-term goal is that people develop their own coding system for reading. It doesn't matter if you underline or highlight, circle or box, etc. What matters is that you develop a system that works for you, that lets you think about the text in different, specific ways as you read.