My reading process plays a huge part in me writing an effective response to complex readings. Usually when I get hard readings or any reading at all to be honest, I must re-read the readings a couple of times until I get an understanding of what is going on. Then I go through the readings again and annotate the text to better my understanding of the text. When I annotate, I make marks on the text, I spilt the reading up in segments, so everything doesn’t seem clustered to me. When it comes to keeping a running summary of the gist of the reading, I’m not that good at it and is something I need to work on more. However, I do track the writer’s argument by identifying claims and supporting complicating evidence. I do mark keywords and concepts in my reading to better my understanding in the reading. Something that I don’t do much is record the reader reactions in the readings. I also ask questions only if I’m interested in the reading, if it’s not interesting to me I won’t ask much about the reading. When annotating I do make text to self and text to world connections naturally. I feel as though I can’t fully explain what I’m writing about unless I do these connections. After annotating, I start my writing response I usually have a general area about what I’m going to write about.  During my writing process I try to use as much information from the text as possible so people can understand the readings but not too much that it’s just response full of quotations. Once I get the certain amount of text that I feel is right in the writing I try to explain the authors point of view on the subject and why the author feels that way about the topic. After that I then try to connect personally with the topic with my own experience and explain how I feel with the topic and then explain whether I agree or disagree with the authors point of view about the topic. Usually when writing my response to the reading I end up having a better understanding of the text when I finish. 

Writing to understand the text 

Writing and responding to discussion questions 

Making connections between the text and self, world, and other texts 

Exploring or testing ideas 

Complicating or challenging ideas