READING FOR COMPREHENSION USING TAGS
Due Date: Month 10, 2017
Lacuna Features Needed:
❖ Annotations (including tags and categories)
Objective
To show students how they can navigate and conceptualize readings using tags. The tags used in this assignment focus on rhetoric and argumentation specifically. Instructors can change or edit the assigned list of tags according to their own instructional goals.
Overview
Tags are a great way to organize your thoughts, track patterns, and trace themes and concepts while reading. After reading, you can then search your annotations using tags on the annotation filter. Alternatively, you can go to the Sewing Kit and limit annotations by tags, which allows you to see what tags have been used across different texts and media.
Estimated Time: Variable depending on the length of the assigned reading.
Instructions
Below are some questions and prompts to think about while you annotate the texts for your next course. The corresponding [tags] are also listed if you would like to make use of them. As a reminder, you add tags to each annotation by clicking the “tags” box at the bottom of the annotator popup.
If your instructor has created “curated tags”, they will show up first in the list of suggested tags when you start typing. Other tags include ones you and other students have used. (Note: unlike Twitter or Facebook, there is no reason to use a “#” hash before your tags.)
As you read your text, use at least three of the corresponding tags while answering at least three of the associated questions:
1. What do you think is interesting? Why?
Tags: [interesting]
2. Identify the main argument and minor arguments
Tags: [main argument] [minor argument] [claim] [evidence]
3. What part of the argument do you find most persuasive? Least persuasive? Why?
Tags: [interesting] [persuasive] [unpersuasive]
4. Do you agree or disagree with the author’s argument? Why?
Tags: [agree] [disagree] [my view] <-- use this tag to show that it's your counterpoint rather than coming from another author
5. What is a possible counterpoint from one of the other authors you’ve read?
Tags: [agree] [disagree] [counterpoint]
Select "Compare" from the categories tabs to categorize your comment as a comparison to another text.
Reflection
Mapping out a text’s main and minor arguments, ways that it is persuasive, and your own thoughts toward the text has a number of benefits. It helps you engage more closely with the text, enhances memory, and can improve your ability to construct arguments more persuasively in your own writing.
By using tags, you can revisit your annotations as the course proceeds to consider, for instance, all the different passages that you tagged as “persuasive.” Ask yourself: How was the author(s) particularly persuasive. Did they use rhetorical strategies like ethos, pathos, or logos? Did they present more than one type of evidence?
Using annotation to read more closely and critically, you can learn the best practices (and those to avoid!) in your own work.
Created by the Stanford Poetic Media Lab