I have to read and annotate a book called "A Place to Stand" by Jimmy Santiago Baca for my English class. I was wondering if someone can give me some general know-hows on how to do this.
Ughhhhh annotations. What you put there exactly depends on the guidelines of your teacher. When I had to to them (my memory is vague on this), we'd have to mark and identify every single type of figurative speech and explain what it meant, then we also had to mark patterns, mark words, and a bunch of other incredibly exhausting crap. It was. Annoying. -Step one is talk to your teacher about what exactly they're looking for, or follow the form/handout that you got for annotations (if you got one) to every article to make sure you've got it down pat. -Step two is to never ever ever procrastinate on it because if you do you'll have a whole freaking book to read an annotate like a few hours before the due date and that's even worse than just annotating it in general. That's all I've really got. Hope that helps...something?
My professor didn't go into much detail about it, she gave a sample article in class and highlighted the theme and unique words that related to the theme of the article. So for homework, she wanted me to read just the prologue and chapter one, but I don't know what to make note of in the story.
If it's for university/college, I would say just write down notes in the margins. Write whenever a passage, word choice, whatever, makes you think; and write down what those thoughts are. So for example: when I was reading Jane Eyre the second time, I focused on how Mr. Rochester treats Jane. Every time he called her by a different pet name, I wrote down what that pet name inferred about how he thinks of her (little bird = easily broken, delicate, helpless, noisy, too free-spirited).
