I wanted to share with you how I annotate my readings for my MSc and simultaneously also for my assignment. Everyone knows on this platform that colour coding is key; but how do you go about that?
Here’s how I annotate my political science/social science papers:
I underline context information; this is information I should keep in mind or know, but it’s not my main focus. A question you can ask yourself to find out whether your information is contextual or relevant is “is this an authors opinion, or is this something that could be considered general knowledge in the field?”
I highlight relevant information to the topic of the paper. Here the focus is on IO behaviour and thus I want to highlight the text that is going to GIVE me information. You could see this as the bit more important step up from the contextual information. In my case, often this is the information the author wants you to know but he will denounce it or go against it!
My number 3 is often either relevant to essay (when I’m reading an article with a uni assignment question in mind) but mostly my number 3 is “examples and concepts” which I will make another post about!
If 2 and 3 are not an option, focus on 1 and 4. Author’s claims and position will be the essence of why you’re reading this paper. Here you highlight specific information that your author says or positions. Example: “this paper deals with the way organisations are - to contrary belief - autonomous in nature.”
