Evaluating Secondary Sources

The two most useful ways to critically read include annotating as i reas as well as going back and re-reading the most important parts to ensure comprehension. Personally, I find that when i annotate text as read it helps strengthen my understanding of the material. It allows the reader to make notes in real time that are pertinent to the text and ensures that their annecdotes arent forgotten by the time the reach the end of the text. Going back and re-reading is also critical especially if the material is particulary complex or hard to understand. I find myself going over the same bits over and over to make sure that i fully get everything that the author is trying to say to me.

The article i chose to read for last week was Horace Nash’s “Community Building on the Border” and while the material itself was not hard to comprehend I did face some small difficulty in the format of their writting. I felt that the author while conveying lots of information to the reader did so in an unorganized fashion. As i was reading the piece it felt as though Nash was just haphazardly telling me various places the New Mexico 24th infantry band in Colombus had been. I don’t think that the author succesfully conveyed the importance or role that this band played and left it to the reader to just kind of piece together their own significance from the article.

Personally I really like the idea of Hypothesis as an online solution for annotating non printed articles because generally i like to write on things I'm reading when I'm able to. I problems I found were just in the actual layout and interface of the program itself. I don’t think it is very intuitive and by the time it is able to used fully my screen felt too cluttered to really figure out what i was reading anymore.