Between the Lines
By: T-Wolf (he/him/his, she/her/hers)
Editorial Team Member
No student in American public schooling is unfamiliar with annotations. Through middle school and high school, whenever one steps into their English classroom, they can always expect to be in the middle of some book or other, unintelligible midnight handwriting scrawled along the occasional page that they’ll have to explain to their teacher. Or, they’re in the middle of some book or other, with a wrinkled sheet of paper where they have to write out observations, sorted into a pre-printed chart that must also be explained to their teacher. As much as I’ve always enjoyed reading, having to do so for English classes squandered what was once a freestanding joy on its own– especially when the teacher reminded us to keep up with those damn annotations. I never enjoyed having to explain the text in these quick notes, having to pause the flow of my eyes just to grasp at the sands and straws in my head. Holding conversations about it in class was fine, writing papers about it was fine– but did I really have to point out something eye-catching enough on every single page?
The first time I enjoyed annotating wasn’t in a physical text, no page flipping at all- but there was a great deal of scrolling. In my junior year of high school, my English class assigned the play The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, for us to read. However, there weren’t nearly enough hard copies in the classroom, so our teacher uploaded a PDF file of the story onto our class page that anyone could download and read online instead. It wasn’t the first time a class had a hefty reading online, but it was the first that we were required to annotate for in-class discussion. However, there were no requirements for what our annotations could look like. After years of charting summaries on sticky notes too small for my handwriting yet too big to stick inside the books, or scribbling half-baked analyses bent at awkward angles over paperbacks that never opened flat enough, I couldn’t be gladder.
That wasn’t the moment I realized I would enjoy The Crucible more than other assigned books, though. I had sparse commentary to jot down at first, falling back on pointing out characterization and parallels and all the other jargon English classes so often told us to poke at texts with. However, as the plot drew me in deeper, I stopped using the same blunted weapons. The dramaticized characters and concepts melted me back into sheer reactions- baffled key smashes, dreading predictions, outraged spluttering, and eons of sarcasm. The mark of a true teenager in high school. But those shorter, instinctual notes and bursts of emotion were far more fun than any format of annotation that had ever been laid out for me before. No complete sentences, no nuance. Just thoughts in thought form, splattered across the margins and between the lines. They weren’t meant for anyone else– not a teacher, not a future essay I might have to write, not even a classmate scrambling at the last minute to ask what happened in the section that they definitely did not read. They were my annotations and mine alone.
I think it speaks to their effectiveness that I’ve still saved the annotated file of The Crucible — and several other class-assigned texts — to my computer, years later, to look back and laugh at my younger self’s thoughts. Whether I’m reading online or in paper, anything assigned for me to annotate is tackled only with the principle of thoughts in thought form. Sometimes that means I don’t always have something to say, instead just underlining or highlighting a portion of words that catches my eye, and leaving it at that. Regardless, I do my best not to force anything. I can tell when I’m not in a headspace for annotating, and come back another time. And I can also tell when I am mentally slavering at the chance to write out everything I think about a specific diction choice or sentence structure or all the other jargon that I have realized I love to see.
Many people have different annotation methods. Some find it delightful to annotate everything they read, whether in their free time or for another purpose. Some fall back on color-coded stickers and tabs that stick out the sides of the pages. None of these, nor my own, are objectively better than any other. Reading deserves to be treated as the individualized exchange of ideas that it is between the words and the reader. The formats that modern English classes tell us to place those exchanges through can serve as a starting point for figuring out one’s preference, but they’re in service of a standardized curriculum first, rather than ourselves. If more freedom was offered to students in how they could leave their thoughts along the pages, I believe there would be far less internal groaning whenever teachers next declare that they’ll be checking everyone’s copies for proof of annotations. I know I still do when told to annotate a reading, as much as I am fond of my own methods. Frustration with the simplicity and intangibility of my own thoughts is something that has been taught to me, and I hope that I — and many other struggling students — will one day be satisfied with my own head, no explanations required.
