Annotating is a very personal preference. No two people annotate the same way. I have watched a lot of “How I Annotate” videos on YouTube, but the style and way I’ve chose to do is not exact to what I saw.

Like I said, it’s all about personal preference.

In last week’s post, I talked about the concept of it all and introduced Trying Tuesday. This week, I’ll talk about the set-up and preparation for the start of the project! I’ll be starting on March 1st (okay not exactly March 1st, but that weekend).

Book:

Obviously I’m going to need a book to annotate a book, and I’ve chosen These Shallow Graves by Jennifer Donnelly. I talked about the reason I chose this book in the last post, but short summary: I’ve read it before, I love it, I want to reread it, I know I can annotate it. Simple!

Post-It:

I’m using two kinds: the big post-it, and tabs. The big post-it will be for extra space for me to write down thoughts, questions, observations, analyze, and so on. The book’s margins and spaces might not be enough for all my thoughts so I’ll just write it on a separate paper. The colour for these don’t matter, but I’m going with yellow just because it’s easy to see the writing on there.

The tabs are for marking specific things. I have four colours with different meaning:

Red/Characters: whenever I read something that adds to the character, makes me like them or hate them or feel towards them, I’ll tab it. I’ll tab for actions, thoughts, dialogue, anything that is direct to a character.

Green/Quotes: whenever I read something that I like, any pretty words or good quotes, I’ll tab it with green.

Blue/positive emotions: anything I love, that makes me laugh, swoon, cheer, or feel/show positive emotion is being tabbed with blue.

Yellow/miscellaneous: anything else that doesn’t fall into the above categories (interesting information, writing notes, questions, etc) is tabbed with yellow.

Highlighters:

I’ll use highlighters to highlight the part that goes with tabbing. The two go hand in hand. So for example, I’ll highlight a quotation and tab it with green. The colours for highlighters and tabs will match because why not?

Black Pen:

For writing down my thoughts, reactions, questions, and any writing.

And here it is! It’s not too complicated or anything, I think it’s pretty basic annotating stuff. I’m excited to try it out and see how I like it. It is my first time going all out with annotation, so we’ll see what works for me and what’ll change for next time.

Do you annotate? Do you have a specific way? Let’s talk all things annotating in the comments!

Thank you for reading and see you next time ❤