Reading Reflection

In Performative Literacy: The Habits of Mind of Highly Literate Readers, Sheridan Blau takes traditional literary methods and thoughts and flips them one hundred eighty degrees. This extreme focus on the fundamentals of reading has changed a simple source of pleasure to a task that, to many people, has become a chore. 

 For me, the task of reading has now become a chore. I used to enjoy diving into another world with endless possibilities on the pages of a novel but now, not so much. I feel a lot of pressure to understand every word I read as well as annotate and be prepared to answer any possible question about the text. While reading a book for school, I struggle to understand text as I reread over and over with a pencil in hand, prepared to mark down the slightest details. The annotations come as a struggle as well. Personally, I like to make mental notes rather than interrupt my reading. Though the concept of annotations is nothing new, I have never liked it because it takes away from a good novel as it interrupts my focus, which Blau claims is so very important.

To help my reading, I can try to capitalize on things I already excel at such as rereading as an assurance that I understand what’s going on; as well as working on things like focusing my attention to the text and text only while I maintain useful note taking that can be later used in writing.