Active reading requires annotation and attention in the text. It is easy to become distracted and to skim through a text, but when that happens you lose a great understanding of the text that is being read. Susan Gilroy in her article “Interrogating Texts: 6 Reading Habits to Develop in Your First Year at Harvard”. She states, “Annotating puts you actively and immediately in a ‘dialogue’ with an author and the issues and ideas you encounter in a written text.” Annotation gives you a better understanding of text in a way that is easy to go back and find and pull information out of the text. Writing in the margins and beneath paragraphs help go quickly to the right information you are looking for. This not only helps you make connections to the text but helps find evidence for the claims that you are making in your own paper. This helps develop the critical reading aspects as well. When you annotate you look deeper into text and find the pieces of the text that matter the most. Integrating these pieces into my papers has never been a struggle for me, but meaningful reading can be a challenge. As shown bellow with the annotations I have attached I increased the amount of comments I left in blue that would relate to my essay and underlined text I that would work well in black. Having different colors help me the most in increasing my active reading and annotating skills.