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 Joanna Wolfe’s (2002) research with undergraduate English students demonstrates that marginal comments influence students’ perceptions of the source text; passages with evaluative annotations are more effective than underlining in boosting student recall, while, interestingly, the perceived position of an annotator has the ability to shape readers’ responses to the text. For example, annotations by a professor, teacher, or person the student believes is an authority affect the way the text is received; accordingly, many students were “swayed in the direction of the gloss’s valence (i.e., positive evaluations uplifted students’ ratings of source arguments, and negative evaluations depressed their ratings)” (Wolfe, p. 319). Wolfe’s study confirms what many educators—from Erasmus to the current day—have known about the power of marginal commentaries to affect the reception and interpretation of a text. The ability of “negative” comments to affect how a reader relates to a source has pedagogical implications for writing practices as well as reading practices. For example, when a teacher returns a piece of writing to a student, if the comments in the margin are mainly negative at the beginning, the student may disengage from the comments.

" to affect the reception and interpretation of a text"

"affect the way the text is received"

"swayed"

" For example, when a teacher returns a piece of writing to a student, if the comments in the margin are mainly negative at the beginning, the student may disengage from the comments."

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Some studies have investigated the degree to which annotations can be used by subsequent readers. Wolfe (2002, p. 300) considers not only the possibility that “the annotator’s presence can influence readers’ interactions with the source text” but she even goes further and imagines that “if students perceive the annotator as a potential reader of their own texts, they might envision a particular, opinionated reader already familiar with the source texts” (Wolfe, 2002, p. 301). Some research indicates that 914 JDOC 70,5 highlighting improves retention and that “readers of instructional material containing little or no typographical cueing may benefit from highlighting done previously by others (especially if done by students seen as high achievers)” (Fowler and Barker, 1974, p. 364)

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