Pre-Reading Tip: Annotating Titles [Assignment/Rubric]
Christopher Manes
Learning Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this assignment, students will
- prepare for reading a text by analyzing its title through the 5W1H (Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How) questioning technique.
Assignment
The following assignment serves as a supplement to the material covered in:
Reading and Writing Successfully in College: A Guide for Students by Patricia Lynne, Chapter 1, section on “Using Pre-Reading Strategies”
Select an essay or work of literature. Before you read the entire text, annotate the title by listing who, what, when, where, why, and how questions.
For example,“Regarding Carville: The Letters of Norbert and Edmond Landry” is the title of a history essay. Without reading the article, here are some questions someone might develop based on what they want to know or hope to learn from the title:
- Who were Norbert and Edmond Landry?
- What is Carville?
- When were Norbert and Edmond living?
- If Carville is a place, where is it?
- Why are these people (Norbert and Edmond) important to Carville?
- How should Carville be regarded?
Pre-Reading Suggestion: Students should also circle words they do not know in the title and make questions about the definition or meaning.
Now that questions have been developed from the title, you can begin reading the essay with a purpose (to answer your questions).
Rubric
| Unsatisfactory (1 pt) | Needs Improvement (2 pts) |
Meets Expectations (3 pts) |
Exceeds Expectations (4 pts) |
Outstanding (5 pts) |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Selected title (ST) of chosen text can be one-word if the text used is appropriate to the course subject and teacher’s guidelines on the type of source he or she wants: primary, secondary, or tertiary; academic sources, if required, will usually have main and subtitles. | ST does NOT fit with the course subject or instructor guidelines such as what type of source is needed: primary, secondary, or tertiary. If an instructor requires academic sources, the lack of main and subtitles can warrant this score | ST fits with the course subject but may lack components such as a main and subtitle if an academic source is required or not represent the preferred type of source: primary, secondary, or tertiary | ST fits with the course subject and includes a main and subtitle. If one-word titles are accepted by the instructor then texts also represent the appropriate source-type. | (not applicable) | (not applicable) |
| Student questions (Qs) include who, what, when, where, why, and how and may be basic (definitions, etc.) to complex. | Qs are either absent or mostly incomplete in their coverage of who, what, when, where, why, and how | Qs show student’s ability to develop inquiry and analysis but one point is missing | Qs show student’s ability to develop multiple points of inquiry and basic analysis | Qs meet expectations but one or two show higher level inquiry and analysis | Most Qs show higher level inquiry and complex reasoning: i.e., application, comparison, etc. |
Downloadable Resources (Rubric)
Click here to download a Word Doc version of the rubric:
Attribution:
Manes, Christopher. “Pre-Reading Tip: Annotating Titles [Assignment/Rubric]” Strategies, Skills and Models for Student Success in Writing and Reading Comprehension. College Station: Texas A&M University, 2024. This work is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
