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a level english lit help

ive finished GCSEs and my summer work is to read Othello and Handmaids tale. should i be annotating and highlighting stuff as i go thru or just read???
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Original post by ismaelishere
ive finished GCSEs and my summer work is to read Othello and Handmaids tale. should i be annotating and highlighting stuff as i go thru or just read???

Yeah if i was you I'd annotate them as it would save you so much time. But tbf I'm about to go into year 13 and never annotated my book for English Lit. Okay that's acc so bad no wonder im only getting a C.
Original post by ismaelishere
ive finished GCSEs and my summer work is to read Othello and Handmaids tale. should i be annotating and highlighting stuff as i go thru or just read???

I mean if you can, that'd help you a tonne for exams because quotes is something I really struggled with. Maybe identify 3/4 themes and use a different highlighter or smthn to note relevant quotes as you're going along
You can if you want personally I didn’t highlight or annotate any of my summer reading before year twelve because I find it helps to read it once without thinking of the language or anything and just read as if I’m reading for leisure so i can better understand the plot and the characters you can always go back and annotate after reading if you want that’s what I did.
hi! i’ve just finished y13 and englit was one of my a-levels. my strategy for each text was to do a «*cold read*» first (just reading as you would a book for pleasure) to make sure you’re secure on the plot/characters etc before getting too hung up on annotating. then i annotated as we worked through it in class and then nearer to the final read the text again with all of my annotations summarising everything. this strategy worked well for me, but everyone is different! maybe annotating what stands out to you as you do a cold read could work well, there’s time to build on it later!
I think it’s somewhat down to personal preference, but I would just annotate anything particularly significant, but also not stress at this early stage about having annotations all over.

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