CORE 173: World Christianity (Schiavone Camacho Spring 2025)

Before you create an annotation for a source, you need to know what it is? It is a blog post? A news source? Is it an encyclopedia? A book?

You can use some of the lateral reading skills outlined in the video below to help determine what you are reading.

Here are some questions you can ask as you evaluate and read your source:

Who wrote this? Did they have a particular purpose in writing it?

Where is this published? Or who is responsible for reviewing and editing it?

Does this source point me to other sources that might help me in my research?

First of all, you will need to spend time reading your source.

Shorter articles (blog posts, news, etc)

• You will need to read the full thing, probably more than once. 
• Take notes in whatever manner you are used too.
• If it helps, you can try printing it out and highlighting important parts
• To practice summarizing it, try describing the article to a friend (imaginary ones count too!)

Books (print and ebooks)

• Read the description of the book, does this fit your topic?
• Try reading the introduction or the conclusion, these are generally shorter and often in scholarly books, the author will lay out their entire argument or give you summaries of individual chapters
• Use the Table of Contents or, if using an ebook, the Search function to find the chapters or sections that most relate to your topic