!. Highlighting:
Simply a referential mark in your text. Although this seems simple enough, the thought behind your highlights is extremely important to you. After awhile, you will see certain common threads in your own thoughts as well as the author's. In this sense, you are exploring self through the text's "other." You learn who you are in relation to the text at hand.
2. Annotation
Another point of reference. Annotation is generally marginal notation--nothing elaborate, just a reminder of why you thought the passage was important enough to highlight in the first place. But, again, your annotation keeps you aligned with an emerging agenda--each time you annotate, you explain to yourself why certain parts of the text are important to you while others are not. You reinforce your position.
3. Paraphrase/Summary
This is the ability to put in your own language the thoughts of an "expert" or professional who might apply exclusive professional language (jargon, buzz words). Paraphrasing is, essentially, a form of self-explanation in conjunction with a positive sort of language-play. By changing the language and retaining the gist of an object text, you may realize the importance of language patterns and the ability of language to include or exclude. Putting it in your own words makes it your own. Summary is another form of "trimming down" a text to its essential "message" (or in many instances what you SEE as the essential message). It is another way to control text and sharpen your own critical abilities.
4. Synthesis
Synthesis is the putting together of specific parts of texts you have studied, annotated, paraphrased and summarized. Here is where your own critical agenda takes full form. By keeping an eye on your own prize, you can synthesize the parts of your various texts into a viable support group designed to back up a predesigned thesis (but, we must keep in mind that in the process of researching an agenda, we might well discover a new unavoidable twist). The whole IV step process from highlight to synthesis might be seen as a taking apart and reordering of an object text to suit your own needs--a means of controlling a text and rendering it secondary to your own primary agenda.
