In this exercise, students are invited to annotate a work of journalism: that is, to create a set of contextual explanations, definitions, or comments in the margin of the original text. In effect, it’s like you’re created an “authorized” or scholarly edition of a given journalistic text.

For example, you could take a chapter of Michael Herr’s Dispatches, and have students underline and then take responsibility for providing the meanings of an allusion, showing a quick map of a city named, saying when an event referred to happened, and so on. If you do this though an online software program–I have used Perusall myself–students can also (a) provide images or hypertext connections or (b) comment on each other’s annotations.

Here, the exercise I am suggesting has a couple of simple steps. 

Exercise

After familiarizing themselves with the annotation definition in the glossary, they can follow the following sequence:

1. First, students should be provided with, or asked to come up with, online texts of narrative or literary journalism–preferably not from the contemporary moment. for instance:

• George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
• Stephen Crane, “An Experiment in Misery”   or
• Jimmy Breslin, “Digging JFK Grave was His Honor”
• chapters from Joan Didion, “The White Album”

2. Students then can make their own annotations either online or in written documents that are circulated to the rest of the class. the can be instructed to pick a place name, a quotation or allusion the writer makes, a personality, or an historical event. Students can also work in groups on these categories.

3. And finally-you can have a class conversation, or ask students to write a reflection, on some of the interpretive effects–as well as the advantages or disadvantages–of adding or subtracting such annotations. Why does a writer include a context, a clarification–or exclude it?

Asking students what they learned from the annotations can also be helpful.

Finally, you can use annotation to compare evaluations or reflections on a writer’s style as well. That is, have students pick a “block” of two or three sentences, and have them write & compare comments on the journalist’s voice, word choice, imagery and the rest.