Marking Up Text 2.0

notes on our popular activity with new examples

Students benefit from having a physical and visual relationship with a text. Making annotations improves comprehension. When students highlight, underline, write comments, make connections, and ask questions, they engage actively with the material and deepen their understanding of the words on the page.

In this activity, we give students a short piece of text—one that fits on a single page with ample space in the margins. For example, when we began reading The Odyssey, we centered the first twelve lines of the text in the middle of a page using a large font and invited students to “mark it up” as an opening activity. This approach also works well with poems, selections from children’s books (text only, without illustrations), Shakespeare soliloquies, or key paragraphs from longer works of fiction.