A few days ago in class we read Thank You Ma’am by Langston Hughes in order to annotate and anylize it. First of all, before you continue reading this, I suggest clicking that link right now and reading it, because it’s very good.

Okay, you’ve read it? Good, let’s continue. I’ve had lots of classes before where we had to “Talk to the Text,” and write all sorts of things on it. In class, we had to annotate this story, and while doing that, I discovered something: I cannot Talk the the Text at all, but I’m pretty good at annotating. My annotations included lots of stylistic things. For instance, I felt that the types of colorful description used — “.. a large purse that had everything in it but hammer and nails,” or “kicked him right square in his blue-jeaned sitter.” — feel like they’re related to traditional oral storytelling. The types of annotations we learned about had less focus on this, but I still felt it quite nice.

We learned two strategies for annotating: the oddly named DIDLS (pronounced “diddles”) and the Signpost strategy. DIDLS focuses on various elements of the text, whereas the Signpost strategy looks for elements which signal the plot, conflict, character development, etc. Finally, yesterday we looked at the types of questions you should ask about the story. This ties us right back into what is emerging as our theme for the year.

The strongest question that you can consider is: What is the author saying about being human? We talked about it our first day, we’ve gotten to it again, and I think we will continue to talk about it throughout the rest of the year.