Practice
The practice cycle
Unseen skill is built in cycles, not crammed: a timed passage, an honest look at what the annotation produced, one thing to do differently, and another passage. The extract below is out of copyright and stands here as the shape of the exercise; the passages set in class follow.
A passage to work on
From the opening of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892), public domain:
It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer. A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity—but that would be asking too much of fate! Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it. Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted? John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.
Three prompts to annotate against
First, the voice: what does the swerve from ‘romantic felicity’ to ‘asking too much of fate’ tell you about this narrator’s way of managing her own feelings? Second, the sentence shapes: watch the exclamations and the questions, and ask what kind of mind produces them. Third, the last sentence: what has ‘of course’ conceded before the story has even begun?
Further passages and full timed tasks follow from the class materials.
The cycle
Time the reading and plan strictly; write; then mark your own answer against one question: where did an observation fail to become an argument? Carry that one repair into the next passage. Improvement in unseens is nearly always one habit at a time.