Early on in high school—freshman or sophomore year, I cannot remember—I had a well-intentioned but overbearing English teacher who forced a certain way of annotating. Every book, essay, or article we read had to be annotated in highlighter and pencil, and we had to highlight a certain number of ideas per page and meet a threshold of notes per page. I am sure he was only trying to ensure annotation became second nature, however, the rules with which he did that only drew contempt for annotation. Annotation is a deeply personal and individual way of analysis, and the method one uses has to be special to them. Without the freedom to do so and assignment of meeting annotation thresholds, I started a bad habit of highlighting an idea because I needed to for an assignment rather than because I viewed it as important. Later in high school I was granted the freedom to annotate in a way the best suited me, and I finally saw the value in taking extensive n...