Recently, a colleague in the English Department, who was looking over his annotations of a Wordsworth poem, delighted in what the markings brought,  and he thereby remembered the last time he taught the poem, when he initially annotated it. The notes in the book allowed him to relive the ecstasy of first teaching that poem. They also serve, obviously, as a guide to him for his teaching it again. He can borrow on his own learning. It is as if he has created hyperlinks to his memory by making these notes to himself. Some of the notes, then again, are indecipherable because he does not remember what the circled word is circled for. It occured to me that we, English teachers, are among the few who make marks in books actively, copiously and without shame.

So many people find it impossible to take a pencil or pen to a book. They feel as if they are defacing a sacrosanct object by writing in the margins of a book or by circling a word. They learn this from librarians in their youth.  And yet, others take pleasure in writing vast amounts, cramming notes in the corner of pages.  In my trade, we teach students to embark on the latter path by encouraging them to actively read with a pencil, countermanding all the years of the local librarian spent inculcating them to respect books---years spent teaching them not to tear or bend pages, and certainly not write on them.

Which school are you from? Are you uncomfortable with a pen or pencil when your reading? That is, do you treat your books with great care, keeping them neat, clean, and mark free? Or, must you read with a pencil in hand? Must you remark and respond to the text as you read it, adding your own tracings of your reading?

It is a lesson that remains difficult to teach. Students, again and again, tend to refuse--often for good reason--to write in their books. The best argument against it stems from the desire to re-sell these books at a later date; the better shape the books are in, the better price retrieved. Ideally, though, students will not sell their books, but begin to collect a lifetime library. Nevertheless, it is a skill they must learn--the facilty of reading, actively reading, requires a creative involvement with the text itself, including writing in the book, making marks.

I encourage you to take up a pencil when you read; it serves another purpose as well. It slows your reading down, so you can pick up the nuances more readily, assess the tone, appreciate the diction, etc. It personalizes your library, leaves tracks as to where you have been.

Posted by Matthew Kearney at February 7, 2007 2:04 PM

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