The Annotations Assignment

ANNOTATING ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN (For Comp, Intermediate Comp, Lit, and Advanced English)

Read this assignment carefully: This assignment applies to all Maybeck students and your annotations will be graded at the beginning of the Fall Semester by your English teacher.
In general: annotate your text. Annotation is an aspect of active reading. Active reading, the opposite of passively consuming a text, makes the text you own. It allows you to speak meaningfully and intelligently about the novel. That should be your goal in writing your annotations. To read actively you have to really become involved in responding to the text, and annotation is one way of actively responding to the novel as you read it. The margins at the top and bottom of the page are wide enough to support neatly written legible annotations.

Why do we annotate? Annotation makes the text your own; but more importantly, it provides you with a map of your experience that allows you to trace your route back through the text. If you think of the text as unknown territory that you are required to explore, map, and report back on, the annotations provide you with a kind of travel diary and map of the novel. Once you have fully annotated a great, major literary text like Huckleberry Finn, or Dante’s Inferno, or Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, or Homer’s Odyssey, you will always be able to return to that text and pull out the material you need to make a point. Annotation makes the unknown known, and lets you assimilate, and later write on, the material in the book more easily.
A GUIDE TO ANNOTATION:

Neatness counts:

• The neater and more legible your annotations are the more useful they will be in helping you to find your way around the text.

• Because of the practical nature of neatness, we will base the annotations part of the grade on how neatly your annotations are done as well as how thoroughly you have annotated.

• Do this job as though you care about it, and as though you want to look back on it twenty years from now and be reminded of how well you did it; your annotated text should be a work of art.

• Treat your text with respect: don’t needlessly deface it; your teachers, all of whom are book lovers, will have to look at what you’ve done.

Label passages:

Come up with a label for everything significant in the book.
• For instance, the Mississippi river is a major symbol, image, trope, metaphor in this novel; so when a passage talks about the Mississippi, make a marginal note.

• I use the word River, which I write in the margin wherever Twain mentions the river. (See the sample annotation for examples: sample 1, sample 2.)

• I add stars or more words about the passage if it is a particularly important passage about the river. (Again, see sample annotation.)

Label the stories characters tell: (Often these stories will be named in chapter headings, but just as often they won’t.)

• Stories embedded in the larger story have interesting and often significant connections to the larger story.

• Use short phrases or single words for this, if your text becomes too cluttered, it becomes hard to find the passages you need.

• Many of the stories are untrue, but still significant.

• Take it for granted that every detail is connected to the whole novel, and that everything may turn out to be significant and aid you in the task of finding something to say about the story.

Underline key phrases and lines:

• Use underlining sparingly; underlining everything tends to make the notes useless, but systematic underlining of key phrases and ideas helps them to stand out when you want to find them.

• Use underlining to supplement your written marginal notes: underlining used along with systematic labeling to explain the underlining makes the text more useful and allows you find key passages more easily.

Use Brackets to set off key passages: (See sample 1 and sample 2.)

• Instead of underlining whole long passages, use brackets to mark off large segments that you feel are important.

• Label the passages you bracket with words that will help you understand why you bracketed them; for this purpose short phrases or single words are best.

• Brackets are also useful to show where one extended subject or topic leaves off and another begins.

Use annotations to chart characters:

• Always record the first appearance of a character or the first mention of a character both in the margin where it happens and at the end of the book on the blank pages.

• Also record major descriptions of that character (brackets are also useful for this since character descriptions are often extended passages).

• Use the character’s name to note important actions, or speeches of each major character.

Develop a system of easily drawn symbols that you can use to label major recurring themes.

• For example: asterisks, stars, eyes, daggers, exclamation points, circles with initials, or anything that will help you to remember what is going on.

• Keep these neat and consistently drawn.

• If they start to pile up, make a key to the symbols you are using on one of the blank pages at the end of the book (this will allow you to retrace your steps through the book twenty years from now).

Use the blank pages at the end of the book (our edition has a generous five blank pages):

• Our editors have provided you with a generous five blank pages at the end of the edition we’re using.

• Use the blank pages to record the page numbers of especially significant passages and to track major themes as they crop up.

• Also use the blank pages to track first mentions and first descriptions of characters as they show up in the text.