My approach to active and critical reading became more detailed over the course. In the beginning I just highlighted what I thought was interesting. Now I do this but then after I am given the prompt to my essay I go back and re-annotate. I go back to connect the pieces of evidence to the opinion and thesis I formed from the prompt. That is how I now narrow down the best quotes for my essays. It makes the explanation connect to the quote so much better and so much easier to write. Using this I am much more involved in the text I am reading. Rather than just skimming I am thinking about what I’m reading as I go. Asking myself, does this quote fit with what I’m writing? Does this go along with my thesis? Can I use this as a counter claim? How could I tie this into my essay. With my most recent essay, project three, I even went back in and changed my quotes after rereading to find that there were others from my annotation that fit my explanations and body paragraphs better. For example, in my chosen work sample, in the first draft I picked an extremely long quote. I worked to break it down into sections so that it fit better into my final draft and was more of my own words than the source I used. This made it a little more challenging for me because I had to write a certain amount of words but in the end it made my essay sound much better.