Annotating

You may sigh as you read the title, but give this a chance. Annotating the passages is a technique that helps many students boost their scores. Let’s talk about why.

Why annotate or mark the reading test?

Simply:

• Annotating will help you find answers more quickly.
• It will help you to avoid the endless scanning of the passage to find answers.
• It should also help you to understand better what you are reading.

Right and wrong ways to annotate

Think of the last novel you read for school. Was part of your assignment to annotate certain things as you read?

Now think about the types of markings (or annotations) you used to satisfy your English teacher’s request. Do you use underlines, circles, squares, stars, brackets, or perhaps something else? If you’ve used mostly underlines, you’re not alone. This is the most commonly used marking and, thus, has become meaningless.

Wrong ways to annotate

Avoid using only underlines to annotate. Six or so years of annotating novels teaches most students to underline things without really thinking about what they are underlining.

Right ways to annotate

Below is a very opinionated way to annotate your reading passages. Try this out on a couple of tests. From there, you are certainly allowed to keep what you love and ditch what is not helping. We say this because every test-taker is different; thus, what works for one will not work so well for another.

Things to mark from every passage:

1. Names, such as:
   • Jill
   • Grandpa
   • The hooded man
2. Dates (or things that mark time), such as:
   • November 2nd
   • Tomorrow
   • Two months ago
   • Winter
3. Locations, such as:
   • France
   • My best friend’s house
   • At the party

Names, dates, and locations are important to mark because the questions often ask things that are meant to confuse details. Marking these three things will help you keep your details straight.

Now, here’s how to mark them:

As you can see:

1. Names are circled.
2. Dates (or things that mark time) are boxed.
3. Locations have a jagged underline.

Now you know what to mark from every passage. There’s one more step: learning what special things to mark from each kind of passage. We’ll call these “special things” relevant information.

There are four passages on the reading test:

1. Literary narrative
2. Social science
3. Humanities
4. Natural science

We will go into more depth about the four kinds of passages in the [Passage types] chapter. But, for now, here’s a summary of what relevant information is for each kind of passage:

1. Literary narrative: The perceptions, observations, feelings, and thoughts of characters.
2. Social science: The character’s background, accomplishments, values/beliefs, and things that make history.
3. Humanities: This could either behave like a literary narrative or a social science passage. A quick summary is that if the passage is in first person, you should annotate it like you would a literary narrative. If the passage is in third person, you should annotate it like a social science one.
4. Natural science: What is important to science, clearing up scientific misconceptions, what the author is trying to prove in the last paragraph.

This next example includes the three things you should be marking from every passage (names, dates, and locations) as well as some relevant information in parentheses.

Pop quiz: What kind of things should you mark on the reading passage?

Now, what kind of markings should you use to annotate these things?

We recommend you try these specific markings out on a couple of tests before modifying the process to make it your own.

Annotating questions

Annotating the questions themselves keeps you focused on what’s important.

This is especially important for long questions. The longer the question is, the more important it is to annotate it. It can be easy to get lost in a question like the one below.

![ACT reading passage question]

To help this, circle the main elements of the question that help you focus on what it is asking. Here is an example of how you could annotate that same question.

As you can see, the big takeaways from the question are circled. This keeps you focused on what the question wants from you.

This will be important because the test will often try to trick you by giving answers that have familiar language from the passage in them. So, annotating a longer question will help keep you centered on what the question wants so you can avoid choosing an answer that might sound good… but is not truly answering the question.

Now you know how to annotate your ACT Reading passages. Annotating the reading section helps you find answers more quickly, which is a game changer on a test with such a short time limit.