The heart of Critical Inquiry is annotation. Students annotate anything they feel is important, confusing, surprising, or inconsistent; anything that connects to previous texts, classes or experiences, or anything that generates a strong positive or negative response. Students annotate with pen or sticky notes. Using their annotations, students generate questions. These form the basis for class discussion and assignments. This process is particularly productive with “inconsiderate texts”--texts that are difficult for reasons such as poor organization, difficult vocabulary, or unfamiliar cultural assumptions, i.e., the type of texts often encountered in their studies.

Reading is the active construction of meaning.

I decided to bring the Critical Inquiry techniques to computer-mediated learning by using Microsoft Word’s comment feature, an easy and powerful tool for annotating texts.