Which practice best supports recall and analysis when reading informational texts?

• A. Highlighting every sentence in the passage.
• B. Marking important ideas, evidence, and questions in the margins.
• C. Skimming the passage only.
• D. Writing a summary before reading.

Answer: (B)

Engaging with the text through active reading strategies boosts both memory and critical thinking. Marking important ideas, evidence, and questions in the margins helps you identify the main claim and the specific details that support it, creating a concrete map of how the author builds the argument. Those margin notes also capture your own questions or uncertainties, which you can revisit to probe the text more deeply, leading to clearer analysis and better recall when you review later.

If you highlight every sentence, you end up treating many parts as equally important, which makes it hard to pick out the truly essential points and the connections between claims and evidence. Skimming only skips details and the reasoning that links ideas together, so you miss material that would support analysis or memory. Writing a summary before reading can be useful for a preview, but it doesn’t involve interacting with the text as you go, so it won’t strengthen recall of specifics or the ability to analyze how evidence supports the argument.