Page 2 - Writing Moves Digital Toolbox

Digital The
Toolbox
Section 1 DESIGN OF READING APPS

links Useful apps for reading are designed to allow you to do the following.

• Highlight parts of a text you find significant.

• Add and save your comments—including connections you make to ideas beyond the text, ideas you
might elaborate on, questions you have, and speculations you want to follow up on.

• Work with texts in various digital formats.

• Mark up your text, going beyond highlighting to annotating. Some apps designed for tablets and
other mobile devices allow you to annotate by writing directly on the text with a finger or stylus.

• Share your annotations.

• Let you use a bookmarking function or connect to bookmarking apps that allow you to save, search,
and access again material you’ve read.

Functions like highlighting and commenting, which are particularly useful for reading others’ documents for
peer review but which can be used for your own reading notes, can be carried out in Microsoft Word for any
word documents. But for reading and annotating other types of documents—PDFs, ebooks, web pages—you’ll
want to consider other resources.

➤ Resources for Reading in Digital Spaces

There are many different applications for reading and annotating various types of documents. Three reading
apps are particularly useful for working with electronic documents: Adobe Reader, Notability, and Evernote.

• Adobe Reader

This tool is widely used for opening and marking up PDFs, the format you’ll find for many articles you
download from the web. You can highlight, comment (appearing in a comment box when you click on
the cloud icon), and use drawing tools to mark up a text.

You can share your marked-up document (see Figure IV.1.1 on next page) through email or by uploading
it to the cloud-based document storage platform, Dropbox.

Adobe Reader is available at https://acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/acrobat/pdf-reader.html. It is available
in a free or Pro (pay) version (which is often provided by universities for their students). Adobe created
a video, which can be found at https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/how-to/add-pdf-comment.html,
explaining how to use the program’s commenting tools when reading digital texts.