I'll Have Mine Annotated, Please: Helping Students Make Connections with Texts

English Journal Vol. 96, No. 4 March 2007 ach year I strive to explain to students why I love to read, to communicate the connection I have with books. Mocking disbelief is usually the only response I receive. How can I get students to see that what they read can connect to their lives—to what is important to them? How can I help students see that reading will help them understand the confusing and chaotic world in which they live? Two years ago, I sat in on a discussion with Dr. Valerie Wayne at the Folger Shakespeare Library while she was working on the new Arden edition of Cymbeline. Of all the people who have worked with this play, she must know it best. She worked for two months that summer, editing and annotating twenty lines of the play each day. Yet, her effort that summer was a small fraction of the time—ten years!—she will spend with the play. For all of us who love plays, the chance to study one so well, so intimately, is a dream. My students, on the other hand, would rather cut grass with nail clippers. Even so, I was interested in the work that Wayne was doing. Specifically, I was intrigued by the annotations that she was writing to go along with the play’s text. While these annotations were not necessarily personal, they reflected her interaction with the text. I wondered what would happen if I had students annotate a piece of text. I wasn’t looking for detailed analysis and research, and I certainly wasn’t looking for the academic rigor that goes into the annotations of professionally published works, but I wanted a way to view the interactions students were having with text. What were they thinking about as they read? What connections were they making? What questions did they have, and could they find answers to those questions?