When reading articles, especially the bigger ones, it is important to use certain strategies to help your brain retain the information that you are reading. Over this semester, I have used some strategies and procedures to make my understanding of the text, clear. One strategy I frequently used were highlighting and annotations. How I would practice these strategies, is by circling or underlining any important information from the paragraph I’ve just read. Meaning, important facts, important words, etc. This causes the information that I have just read, to refresh the important information in my head. So, this causes your brain to be actively involved in your reading. When annotating, I would give my feedback on the paragraph I just read whether it is questions or little comments about parts throughout the text so when I look back, I can see my thoughts about the text. When reading an article like Kahnemans,  it is vital to keep your brain working so you can catch all the important information you need to truly understand the writing.

This semester, I believe I have developed better reading habits and techniques to allow me to understand what I’m reading, and to easily understand the big picture when reading. Based off of teacher comments, I believe I have made progress in reading, one of the reasons why I think that is because most of the teacher comments where suggestions about my writing. Towards the end of the year, my writing skills picked up, it has seemed like I have drawn out the important information needed for our homework, assignments, and papers. From doing all of the assignments over the semester and practicing the strategies assigned I believe it is clear that I have made improvement in my habits. The result of my habits are still being evaluated so, my true finding of the outcome of my efforts to practice reading habits will be determined soon.

I believe what I need to change or work on for the future is to be able to do all of these small practices by myself without being assigned to do such things. Although, I practiced these strategies because they were part of our homework I still believe I can process texts and understand articles better on my own from this class. But, these strategies have proven myself that this is a great way to understand your texts and you must do them if you are planning to write a good piece about the texts. Something else I believe I need to practice in order to become a stronger writer is to keep trying to balance my views with the authors views and connecting them together. Over this semester, this part of writing seemed to be a major factor between a decent paper and a good one. In the beginning of the year, It was popular of me to only use the authors views and use myself for explanation. There was little to no connection or evaluation to my views. So, I believe that if I continue to carry these strategies in the future I will grow as a reader and writer.

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