Book Annotating Techniques?

[chooby]

Hey guys! One of the major texts for our school next year is Burial Rites. I've already read through it once and I was wondering what is an effective way to annotate whether its by themes or by characters. Just wanted to see what systems other people have used because I don't know where to start.

[peterpiper]

Hey guys! One of the major texts for our school next year is Burial Rites. I've already read through it once and I was wondering what is an effective way to annotate whether its by themes or by characters. Just wanted to see what systems other people have used because I don't know where to start.

Since you read your text, start looking at essay prompts and plan and write. You can't do better than that. You'll find some evidences will be more flexible/stronger than others and eventually it should become second nature to you. My advice would be to just start writing, but that's just from my experiences. I found I'd procrastinate with compiling ideas and themes from actually writing, so I never found it helpful to list themes and evidences unless it was actually to write an essay. Hope that helps.

Edit: Oops misread; annotations should just be anything you find interesting. I usually annotate what I find to be interesting or particularly insightful in terms of character development. It shouldn't be exclusively on thing, but as for all annotations, they're to help you. So write whatever helps trigger an idea when you first read it.

[chooby]

Ok thank you!!

[courtney2502]

Hey! I'm also studying Burial Rites next year, and have also annotated the book as it was a part of my holiday homework.

When I annotate books, I usually like to get a list of themes and other things from my teacher of things I should be looking out for specifically. For Burial Rites, my teacher gave me the themes Love, Control and Agency, Truth, Loss, Moving Forward, as well as Conventions such as Symbolism and Motifs. I then assign each theme/convention a colour and I go through the book from the start to the end, and which ever quote or passage of the text I think is usuable for an essay and is relevant to any of the things I'm annotating, I'll highlight it in that colour and write notes in the same colour pen on the page close to the quote (Burial Rites has narrow margins so I used sticky notes.) I'm known at my school for going overboard with my annotations, and my books end up looking like colouring books, but I can definitely say I am always prepared for essays and have my quotes ready to go! If you want me to upload pictures as examples I can definitely do so!

[lilyrosee]

Firstly, consider yourself super lucky to be studying Burial Rites - it is an awesome text and probably my favourite text I have ever studied during my schooling.

To annotate my texts in VCE English I did two things, highlighting and used coloured tabs/flags to mark things...

Highlighting:
Pink-Significant words/phrases, dates & places
Green- Literary devices (symbolism, metaphor, imagery)
Yellow- Character analysis/ Theme evidence

Themes Flags (specifically for BR):
Pink- Hope & Faith
Orange- Freedom vs Imprisonment
Yellow- Abandonment/Isolation
Green- Life & Death
Blue- Belonging

I hope this helps 

[sophomania]

I’m actually not too much of a fan of annotating books because it’s really annoying to have to go through the book to look for specific quotes or passages. So I never made a colour coding system for annotations. In fact, I rarely read my annotations. I made heaps of annotations but they were more so I could follow and understand the text as opposed to being notes that I could refer to later. If there was anything that really interested me or was something important, I noted it down with a page reference in another notebook. This reduced the need of having to flip through the novel.

What I did was throughout the year, I would make a quote bank which had specific themes or characters as headings. I would frequently then transfer any quotes I highlighted into this quote bank.

[Secc119]

I found that highlighting using different colours was good for quotes relating to different characters. Like important things abouut them or like key statements which define them. I liked to annotate on the side as i was reading so i could just blurt out ideas and told myself I'd check but honestly forgot and cbs. Writing out thematic paragraphs was good for me personally but idk about you.

[chooby]

Thanks for all the help guys! Hope I can get this annotated before school starts!

Hey! I'm also studying Burial Rites next year, and have also annotated the book as it was a part of my holiday homework.

Woo! Glad to know a person from a different school doing the same text.

When I annotate books, I usually like to get a list of themes and other things from my teacher of things I should be looking out for specifically. For Burial Rites, my teacher gave me the themes Love, Control and Agency, Truth, Loss, Moving Forward, as well as Conventions such as Symbolism and Motifs. I then assign each theme/convention a colour and I go through the book from the start to the end, and which ever quote or passage of the text I think is usuable for an essay and is relevant to any of the things I'm annotating, I'll highlight it in that colour and write notes in the same colour pen on the page close to the quote (Burial Rites has narrow margins so I used sticky notes.) I'm known at my school for going overboard with my annotations, and my books end up looking like colouring books, but I can definitely say I am always prepared for essays and have my quotes ready to go! If you want me to upload pictures as examples I can definitely do so!

Firstly, consider yourself super lucky to be studying Burial Rites - it is an awesome text and probably my favourite text I have ever studied during my schooling.

To annotate my texts in VCE English I did two things, highlighting and used coloured tabs/flags to mark things...

Highlighting:
Pink-Significant words/phrases, dates & places
Green- Literary devices (symbolism, metaphor, imagery)
Yellow- Character analysis/ Theme evidence

Themes Flags (specifically for BR):
Pink- Hope & Faith
Orange- Freedom vs Imprisonment
Yellow- Abandonment/Isolation
Green- Life & Death
Blue- Belonging

I hope this helps 

I found that highlighting using different colours was good for quotes relating to different characters. Like important things abouut them or like key statements which define them. I liked to annotate on the side as i was reading so i could just blurt out ideas and told myself I'd check but honestly forgot and cbs.

This is one the first English texts in a long while that actually interested me and that I read the whole way through so I'm glad I got this text too. Colour coding is a must for me so I have started allocating themes to colours and tabbing them as well. Think I need some more highlighters for things apart from things like literary devices, character development, motif etc. Right now the themes I'm focusing on are Love, Religion and Fate, Gender, Landscape, Power and Class Heirarchy, Truth, Stories and Opinions, Death. Mainly just going with what peterpiper has said about choosing what speaks out to you so I chose themes that both personally stuck out to me and ones hinted by my teachers that'll be pretty useful.

What I did was throughout the year, I would make a quote bank which had specific themes or characters as headings. I would frequently then transfer any quotes I highlighted into this quote bank.

I actually really like this idea. I'll try to implement this once I finish annotating the whole book.

Writing out thematic paragraphs was good for me personally but idk about you.

What do you mean by writing thematic paragraphs?

[Secc119]

So like i would pick my important themes, and then just try explore the theme as much as possible without the constraints of an essay prompt. Like just unload as much of your ideas as possible.

[spectroscopy]

I think a great way to annotate that is often underutilised is to simply note a certain pages/sections a text, and then in a separate notebook have a very fleshed out explanation of ideas/themes/ways to use the relevant piece of the text in the future. I would always run way out of space trying to annotate entirely within a book LOL

[hdxx]

I write the themes at the front of my book and add a coloured tab to each theme, that way when I come across the theme I can just tab the page. I will also write things that come to mind about characters, authors intention etc but not too much. Once I am finished I will sometimes create a document with all the themes in a table and go through my book and elaborate on the themes and write examples and little notes. I find this helps as I can easily go back and read over each theme.

[not.yet.a.nerd]

I found a complete online course for burial rites, made up of chapter tutorials and close analysis. You can listen to the audio analysis, annotating each chapter as you go. https://pioneeringtuition.teachable.com/p/burialrites
It costs $25 but it's super detailed, an invaluable resource if you were planning on writing analytically on burial rites for the exam! It has a list of practice topics that cover all major themes that can be assessed on the exam.
The first chapter is free so you can check it out to see if you like it.