There are many reasons to ask students to annotate text: for basic comprehension, to show evidence of conceptual understanding, to show what is implied, to identify the claims in an argument, to read like a writer and identify characteristics of genre, to notice the nuance of language…and many other reasons. Giving guidance as to what we want students to annotate for will be beneficial for the reader. Otherwise, they will annotate everything that comes to mind, and the work may not be helpful to the reader or the teacher.