Learn How a UChicago Creative Writing Instructor Uses Annotation to Help Students Read Like Writers

by | Dec 2, 2025 | Pedagogy

Clip Art of Table-Sized Book, with students sitting around it, writing and talking

“A reading list is both the heart that animates a course of study and the skeleton on which the course is built.”

– William Germano and Kit Nicholls, Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything

While students engaging deeply with assigned reading is the ideal across all educational contexts, UChicago in particular holds a reputation for its culture of reading, so much so that a 2024 Atlantic article titled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” held up UChicago as the “last bastion” of reading. Chicago Maroon writer Leah Tabakh dug into this image of UChicago in a recent article and found students and instructors alike committed to closely reading full books and engaging in spirited discussion–even when that workload eats into time spent reading for pleasure. As one of the interviewees, UChicago creative writing professor Vu Tran, put it,

“People here don’t pursue what they pursue just for professional reasons, at least in the humanities—they pursue it for its own sake. When you have that level of enthusiasm and curiosity about a subject, it can create an atmosphere where you have a feeling like that—[that] this is the ‘last bastion of reading.’ So even if it’s not empirically true… I think the feeling is real.”

If you’re looking for a way to promote that level of enthusiasm and curiosity in your classes, UChicago annotation tools and practices already used by UChicago instructors can help make the process of reading an assigned text both active and communal. Earlier this summer, Meghan Lamb, a lecturer in the department of Creative Writing here at UChicago, spoke with ATS about how she does this using social annotation. Lamb shares course readings in a tool called Hypothesis, which allows students to make direct line-level comments, ask questions, and reply to each other in the margins of the text. This blog post provides insights from our discussion with Lamb that you can apply to your own teaching practices using UChicago tools. You can also jump to particular sections using the Table of Contents below:

Why Annotate?

For Lamb, who teaches creative writing workshops that often reach across genres, the benefits of social annotation include, among other things:

  • More mindful processing of the text
  • Deeper engagement in interpretation
  • Preparing for better in-class discussion
  • Improved response habits in peer review
  • Helping students learn to read as writers

This practice brings excitement to the work of reading not just for the students, but for Lamb as the instructor. More visible interaction between the text and the reader frequently offers surprise, which she’s come to value in discussions:

“That’s one of the best things about social annotation. They make connections that I wouldn’t anticipate. Sometimes they’re not the most apt connections, but sometimes we make interesting discoveries just in the process of probing, like ‘Why did you choose this?’ And there will be some reason that I didn’t even think of. All of that becomes part of the discussion.”

Annotation as a deliberate practice helps combine the organic process of following what interests you in a reading with structure, which, while essential to move discussions forward, can also make reading a chore instead of an exploration. Looking back at her own experience as a reader, Lamb reflects on how helpful it was to be able to reflect on her path through a text:

“As a student myself, and as a commenter on my students’ work, I always found the process of leaving line level annotations in the margins of a text to be a more intuitive way to engage with the work, and also, a more tangible way, to look back and trace through my responses as a reader as I was actually reading through the text. I think it’s really helpful to have a record like that, not just of formalized responses to questions, but in terms of the path of where your interest is guiding you as you read through a text.”

For readers who are new to annotation, it can be hard to build that practice at first. As an author and an instructor, Lamb is experienced in this approach, and her way of helping students develop that skill is an excellent example of mentoring students in a discipline.

Balancing Organic Engagement with Expert Guidance

In her assignments, Lamb balances giving students a specific task in the reading with leaving room for personal interest. It’s a shift from her previous approach of directing students to particular features or passages to discuss. In that iteration of reading and discussion, leading questions sometimes yielded passive answers. As Lamb describes it, “I was pointing to a specific thing I wanted them to talk about, and it wasn’t always necessarily the thing that they were most interested in talking about as an example.”

Now, however, her approach is the inverse: she gives her students a specific direction for the kind of thing they should look for in the text and lets them find their own examples, tapping into the same curiosity that Tran describes. She finds that room to wander yields more engagement than a leading question:

“Giving them full agency to find that thing and articulate why that’s the thing that they’re looking at engages them a lot more critically than kind of spoon feeding them a question and a specific thing to talk about. I think students feel a lot less hemmed in when they’re talking about an example that they have chosen.”

This more open-ended approach also supports the work of her discipline by highlighting how your reading influences your writing. Lamb uses annotation to show students how to read as writers. “Particularly in a creative writing class,” she explains, “the students are encouraged to read as writers and to find portability to their own projects and their own interests as writers, in addition to analyzing the text for things like themes and literary devices.”

This may at first seem primarily useful to a creative writing instructor. However, instructors across disciplines might find a few opportunities relevant to them reflected in this approach:

  • In what way can intentional reading in this class help students become more engaged in the discipline and feel they belong in that work?
  • How can I support students becoming oriented in the conventions of writing and knowledge construction in this field?
  • And finally, in a moment when AI offers to automate the decisions that go into writing, you can draw attention to the pleasures of making your own choices as a writer.

Setting Up a Fruitful Discussion

Where Can Annotation Fit Into My Class?

While the obvious use case for annotation is class reading, it may be hard to know how to integrate this approach into your quarter.

Lamb did this by replacing some of her existing reading response activities. She provided multiple prompts to give her students options, but they sometimes became overwhelmed by long weekly questions. As the purpose of these questions was to guide their reading, annotation presented a natural alternative.

Using annotation prompts, Lamb connects concepts in the students’ assigned reading with questions of craft that feed into their own writing. The task of selecting a passage to highlight and discuss means that the reader needs to get specific, which has been cited by other UChicago instructors as a benefit of annotation activities. In Lamb’s activities, students have the freedom to focus on parts of the text that grab their attention, but there’s also a standard of thoroughly explaining their selection:

“I’ll have them write two to three sentences about why this particular example interests them. But the annotations usually connect back in a really specific way with what we’re discussing that day and help encourage the students to look for specific examples of that theme and practice as it’s working on the page, because they’re actually like pointing it out and locating that on the page.”

For Lamb, the focus is craft, but the approach carries over into many disciplines and genres:

Orienting Your Students

While Hypothesis has a fairly simple interface for students to use, many instructors find it useful to orient students to how this tool works both in general and how they would like to see it used in their class. One of the most popular activities to get students started is the “Syllabus Annotation” activity, in which students engage more deeply with this important document, setting the tone for asking questions in class while also getting used to the interface.

To get students oriented in this new practice and the type of text she assigns, Lamb leads a synchronous reading as a precursor to the asynchronous annotation they’ll be doing in the quarter:

“Usually on the first day we’ll read a piece in class together, and I walk them through a text and model how we’re going to be using social annotation a bit at first, but I gradually cede more and more control over the conversation to them as we go. I also give them a few minutes as we’re doing this like practice annotation exercise to practice leaving a comment or two on the practice text, so they can familiarize themselves with the ways Hypothesis works while I’m still in the room to help them.”

In that way, the introduction sets the students up for success in both the technical part of using Hypothesis and the intellectual work of reading in this new mode. Furthermore, Lamb’s support of the students as annotators doesn’t end with the introduction; her prompts help head off the indecision that comes with too many options, and her follow-up after the activity keeps the momentum going from activity to activity.

How Do I Select a Text for Annotation?

While the subject matter, genre, and instructional purposes of your assigned reading may vary, Lamb’s approach offers inspiration across contexts. In order to create engagement with the text beyond satisfying requirements for a grade, she looks for an element of interpretive open-endedness.

“When I’m choosing texts and trying to anticipate which texts are going to be the most successful, ‘Does it seem like there are a lot of examples for them to talk about? And is there a lot of interpretive open-endedness?’ That’s going to keep them engaged with the annotation process, not just as preparation they’re required to do for discussion, but as a way of gathering breadcrumbs to support their interpretation.”

In a time when many instructors are concerned about cheap, easily generated text or audio summaries provided by AI tools, sometimes even generated and displayed before a student asks for it (simply because you search the title), it’s a great idea to highlight the nuances within a text that only a human or group of humans reading together can really appreciate. Interpretive open-endedness can expose what makes an automated summary less interesting, if not less effective.

What does this look like in the creative writing context?

Lamb describes a couple of favorite texts for annotation and what they offer students, combining what’s aesthetically compelling with what’s interpretively intriguing. Here, she describes how she selects texts for annotation:

“In a creative writing context, some of the most compelling discussions we have in terms of students feeling the most agency and exhibiting the most creativity in the examples they highlight tend to be texts where there’s both a steady build of tension…something the text is kind of asking you to track, but asking you to ultimately interpret in a variety of different possible ways. Julio Cortázar stories like ”Letter to a Young Lady in Paris” and Axolotl have been two of the most fascinating stories I’ve asked them to annotate.”

Giving students an occasion to roam texts and the task of explaining what is interesting to them has had great results for Lamb. Some questions to ask of your text:

  • Are there analytical or argumentative approaches I think my students can learn from?
  • What can they learn as writers?
  • Where are there elisions between “how” something is said and “what” is said?

This is also a good opportunity to think about what you want your students to get from assigned reading, drawing on your existing discussion questions, writing assignments that come up later in the course, or even the larger learning objectives the course is meant to achieve.

How Do I Get Students to Annotate?

Any new teaching practice comes with a concern that students may not participate or that the activity won’t work out as planned. Many instructors, including Lamb, require participation in this activity and assign a point value to the work, which is easy to do in Canvas assignments. For some students, however, there are also relevant performance anxieties about things like making a sufficiently cogent comment. While there’s some similarity to the traditional discussion posts, there are other factors a student might get stuck on:

  • Is this a good passage for me to highlight?
  • Has someone else already selected this portion?
  • Do I feel comfortable responding to the comment of another student?

As educators and students alike have noted, these conditions can drive students to fall back on AI. This is where the constraints that Lamb mentioned can come in, some limitations that help them look for something specific, so that they have a way to focus their attention and feel confident that they can pick something that fits the bill. Other instructors addressed this concern by assigning different roles to different students in the group, so they have a specific job in their discursive community (summarizing, finding context, etc). You can also divide the larger class into small groups, so that there’s enough of the text to go around.

How Do I Build on the Work of Annotation?

Annotation doesn’t just support out-of-class reading. Lamb also uses it to lead better discussions in the classroom. It gives her useful insights to prepare for class, as well as a view into student thinking that is hard to get by hovering over small group discussions in person.

“I think for me, the biggest appeal of Hypothesis was that it allowed me to prep in a more intuitive way…knowing that I’ll be able to scan over their responses and cherry pick bits that I want to bring out in in-person discussion. I feel this agency and invitation to develop more open-ended and less spoon-feeding questions.”

For Lamb, the ability to review student annotations bridges these two somewhat contradictory truths about learning:

  • Guiding intellectual work is more effective when you have access to process and early thinking.
  • The presence of the instructor can feel intrusive and make some students less willing to share their behind-the-scenes thinking.

For instructors who have tried to combine small group discussions with sharing out to the full class, the dilemma Lamb describes may sound familiar:

“It also gives you a forum to have a very intimate interaction with students as they’re processing things–in a way to kind of look over their shoulder, with built-in boundaries that don’t make it feel like you’re being intrusive. I always hated it when I was a student, when we’d be having small group discussions or something with smaller paired off groups, and the instructor would physically wander around the room and look over people’s shoulders and try to squeeze in and spy on what they were doing, and comment on it. Social annotation gives me a way…to have that sort of intimate glimpse into their process without being intrusive.”

Other UChicago instructors as well have noted how important it is to follow up on what students post, responding at times, showing that you read and value their posts, and inviting people to elaborate on their post or share a reaction to what’s already been posted by a classmate.

(To create small groups for annotation in Canvas, check out Hypothesis’ guidance or reach out to ATS.)

How Annotation Helps Students Connect Better

Building the skill of annotation not only benefits students’ approach to assigned reading and in-person discussion–it also benefits the community of students helping each other improve as writers. Lamb finds that annotation practices help students better process an assigned text also create better conditions for peer review:

  • More specific annotation habits lead to clearer explanations of feedback
  • Better understanding of your own reactions as a reader results in more generous engagement with peer writing
  • Mutually generous engagement with each other’s work promotes more collegial relationships

Not only does she see students habitually making more specific comments and reading more closely in those assigned texts, but she also sees them transferring that skill to other reading contexts. While this may look like a small move, experts on learning have described transfer of a skill to new contexts as one of the more challenging but important parts of durable learning.

Stay Open to Surprise

In closing, Lamb suggests that instructors trying annotation approach it with an open mind, be open to discover new things about your students’ reading, and adapt based on the relationship between text and student:

“So much of the beauty of social annotation is that it leaves you with so much room for intuitive discovery-making and more intuitive adapting and tweaking your processes as you go along, based on whatever feels best for not only that particular course or subject, but that particular student group, and how they’re intuitively responding to the the tool…my main advice is to keep an open mind and to let the use of Hypothesis evolve as the class evolves.”

Ready to get started?

Hypothesis, UChicago’s primary tool for annotation, is fully integrated with Canvas so that instructors can set up annotation activities with greater ease and control. It can be used to annotate articles, PDF files, websites, and even transcripts from YouTube videos. You can set up annotation activities either in connection with Canvas modules or as assignments, and you can even assign different annotation activities to specific student groups you create in Canvas. (It is important to keep in mind that PDF files may need to go through the relatively simple Optical Character Recognition [OCR] process, so that text can be accurately highlighted or used in a screen reader.)

If you would like direct assistance creating and configuring annotation activities for your course, please contact ATS, join us in office hours, or book a consultation with an instructional designer.

ATS thanks Meghan Lamb for taking the time to share these insights and experiences with social annotation!