Throughout the semester, I have developed my active reading skills into something I am prouder of and something in which I can use to help me with my other classes. It helps me to more fully understand the text that I am working with through wrestling with the ideas and summarizing concepts in my own words. This summarizing helps me to remember what I have learned while reading the text because writing topics down uses muscle memory to encode information to our working, as well as long term memory. At the beginning of the semester I made more comments which asked questions and helped me to understand the text. Now I make comments to draw relationships between texts, challenge ideas in the texts, and realize rhetorical devices used to enhance the overall quality of the text with the authors own personal style. Challenging ideas in the text shows your understanding of what was presented in the article and forces you to think about what you read on a deeper level. This commits the information to memory and fosters further thought beyond the surface meaning of the text. At the beginning of the semester, we have not yet written our first essay. In this class our essays require us to make text to text connections, building conversations between ourselves, as well as what the authors we have read say. Drawing relationships between texts while annotating has helped me a lot in our second paper. When I had to think of an idea for my essay, I would only have to flip through one of the texts I read, look for highlighting and a “text to world” label in the margin of the text.