Reading is not a passive experience and reading with a pencil or mouse in hand or even a finger on a tablet helps a reader better understand the passage and render a close reading of the text.

Marking a text allows one to pause in reading, think about a particular passage, and respond to it. If you are reading an online text or one that you do not physically own, it is hard to scribble in the margins, underline words you especially like, or enliven the page with exclamation points, question marks, and emoticons. But Melville seldom read without a pen in hand, and the books he owned are often covered with jottings of all kinds. We encourage students to discover the pleasure of marginalia, in whatever form possible, as a way of getting off the linear path of reading and wandering in the open spaces of the margins. Moby-Dick offers many opportunities for annotating, commenting on, illuminating, or reshaping the text.—Wyn Kelley in Finding your Way and Leaving your Path

ACTIVITY: Reading with Pencil in Hand

Check out “Drawball.” Drawball is a big online graffiti ball on which anybody can draw. So many people have done so that the drawball looks full; in fact, people can keep adding to it. Every addition changes and expands the knowledge contained in the ball by just a little. In this activity, we encourage you to collaborate and build on each other’s understanding of the text you choose to use for this activity. The goal is to achieve a deeper understanding of the text through annotation and ornamentation.

By way of example, we will work with Moby-Dick’s “Loomings” Chapter and refer to the Moby-Dick: Then and Now Loomings: Ishmael and Que.


Break your group into teams. Each team will conduct a close reading of one paragraph by annotating and ornamenting the text. In combination, the teams’ close readings will provide a visual guide to the book through annotation and ornamentation.

Annotation: The act of relating the text to its historical background. Highlighting and defining or expanding on key or unfamiliar terms, concepts, and ideas in a text by identifying their historical context. Key elements of annotation include: defining terms, explaining historical information, researching unfamiliar names or historical elements, and commenting on the text.

First, annotate your chapter by identifying and highlighting the following:

1. Terms you don’t understand
2. Historical knowledge needed
3. Unfamiliar names
4. Personal notes to relay meaning in your own words, summaries you want to remember

Your team can help define the above with dictionaries or other reference works, books and periodicals from the library, talking with others who know the text well, or through Internet searches.

Ornamentation: Making personal connections. Marking passages that have personal relevance or resonance, and embellishing the text in ways that highlight that relevance. Key elements of ornamentation include: visual embellishments including drawings; creative embellishments including word play and free-association; and personal connections to the text including links to an individual experience.

Second, ornament your chapter by identifying and highlighting the following:

1. Personal relevance… What part of the text can you relate to most? What meaning does it convey to you?
2. Add visual identity to the relevant text.

After the group activity, post the collages around the room. Have each team read aloud its portion of the chapter describing their strategies for annotation and ornamentation.

Click on the below PLAY! Challenges to participate in Flows of Reading Community of Practice.

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