The readings that we focused on in this class were very helpful when working on our essays. I read Sherry Turkle’s “The Empathy Diaries” over multiple times this semester. It was the first work we read in January. I have since used it in all three of my projects because I have felt that I understood it the best and agree with Turkle on many different ideas. I annotated my reading packet just about every time I reread the work. I found that rereading the number of times I did really helped me grasp her ideas and opinions. I caught things that I may have glazed over or completely missed the time before. When annotating, I often go through and underline anything that makes me pause, no matter why. I may have paused because I was confused, or because I felt like it was important, or even just because I resonated with it. Anything that truly caught my attention got underlined. Then, if the pausing turns into thinking and maybe a bit of analyzing, I write down my thoughts. They’re usually something short, sometimes a question or my opinion on the matter. Those thoughts and underlined sections are what I go back to when looking through the work to use later in my projects. At the end of the essay, not included in my pictures here, I made a bulleted list of the main ideas of the work. I have a few different lists on this packet: first thoughts, big ideas, what is conversation, and what is empathy. We wrote many informal journals on this work. For the journals, we were given a question or idea on what to write about. Since I annotated so much and wrote overall lists as well as local thoughts, it was easy to find what I was looking for once I knew what the journal would be about. The annotating multiple times certainly takes up a lot of time, but it helped so much because I used Turkle’s work so often this semester. Rereading also made it easier to go back and find what I was looking for because by the end of the semester, I knew which page a certain passage would be on. Understanding the main ideas of a text due to thoughtful reading and annotating made it easier to work my thoughts or other authors’ thoughts in with Turkle’s.
