An annotated electronic document is one in which you choose key words, phrases, or lines in a particular text and discuss them in terms of their immediate context and in terms of the entire work. That discussion can include text, graphics, sound, video, animation, and links to other works. Annotation is therefore a kind of analysis, that is, a discussion of specific parts of an entire text.

An annotated electronic document is not a general commentary in which you discuss some idea throughout an entire work or several related ones. (Two examples of general essay topics are "The Role of Fate in Macbeth" or "The Canadian Judiciary and the Charter of Rights").

Rather, in an annotated electronic document, you focus on a specific part of a single primary work.  (If the work itself is brief enough—like a poem or a painting—you focus on the whole work.)

Instead of saying only what a something means and the necessary context to understand it, you also say what it does—how it affects the readers (or in a  play the characters who hear it). Thank you, Stanley Fish. The effect for example, can be rhetorical—it persuades—or explanatory or causal.

For long works, you can mention other parts of the primary one but only insofar as they relate to the part you are talking about. If something doesn't appear in the part your annotating, you can't speak about it in your critical analysis.

• Efficiency: Information is one central location.
• Speed: Requests to the server are (usually) eliminated after the initial one; users get information faster and with less bandwidth. Faster is better.
• Richer Media: Any media available on a regular Web page are available—but types of media are available in electronic documents that are not available on the Web (interactive video and animation)
• Control: Readers have more control over when and how they access information.
• Interactivity: The document can respond to the reader.

• Technical Terms: thermoluminescence, gerundial, torque
• Proper Nouns: Antigua, John of Gaunt, Lorenz Equations
• Difficult: rebarbative, mendacity, leviathan
• Obsolete : wherefore, sirrah, ferne
• Foreign: schadenfreude, avis, basta

• John Diefenbaker: I am a Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, or free to choose those who shall govern my country.
  
  
• Othello:
  In Aleppo once,
  Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk
  Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
  I took by th' throat the circumcised dog
  And smote him thus. (5.2.361-5)
  
  
• A Typical Art Critic: Executed at the height of Picasso's Blue Period, Jeune fille accoude is a striking drawing of a typical Picasso woman. Looking wistfully out from the picture, she has a gaunt face and a long, emaciated neck.

• Like Words or Phrases That Your Readers Wouldn't Know: iconography, objects in a technical drawing, objects in an interface
• Like Words or Phrases That Require a Cultural or Historical Context: Picasso's Guernica, Hogarth's A Rake's Progress, R. Crumb's Keep on Truckin'.
• Composition: pieta, vanishing point, orthographic projection

A pattern is a set of recurring objects that share common features and are found in a single text. Examples of patterns include the idea of nothingness in King Lear, examples of hierarchy in Plato's Republic, references to freedom in the Canadian Charter of Rights, cubist shapes in a Georges Braque painting, etc.

In order to recognize an instance of a pattern, you obviously first must recognize the pattern. That requires a fairly good knowledge of the entire text.

Briefly stated, an instance is part of a pattern that occurs throughout the entire work. An instance works in three basic ways:

• It restates the pattern (that is, gives a very typical example)
• It reshapes the pattern (changes it in some important way),
• It rejects the pattern (functions as a contrast). 

Strictly speaking, we can construe everything (including patterns) as interpretation, although that's an intellectual dead end. (And, of course, that last sentence is my interpretation of what is an interpretation. And so on and so forth. That's what I mean by a dead end.)

Interpretations can easily slide into mere impressions unless they emerge from specific portions of the text. All your teachers are right: Back it up.

What follows is a very loose heuristic—feel free to use or discard any part of it. It's intended only to get you started.

1. Read the text thoroughly. This may sound obvious, perhaps, but it goes without saying that you must understand the literal meaning of every word in the text. Check the footnotes (if there are any), look things up in the dictionary, or ask an expert. Remember, paraphrase or plot summary is insufficient, but if you don't know what things mean or what's going on, you can't possibly annotate a document.

2. Make some rough notes and list what you think are the major ideas, themes, or image patterns in the whole work. (About four or five would be enough.) Once you have these, you are ready to locate your instances.
   
   To repeat, an instance is part of a pattern that occurs throughout the entire work. Instances works in three basic ways:

   • They restate the pattern (that is, give a very typical example)

   • They reshape the pattern (change it in some important way),

   • They reject the pattern (function as a contrast). 

3. a) Write down why the pattern is important in understanding the whole work.
   
   b) Determine where and how the pattern appears elsewhere in the work (be ready to quote a few brief examples).
   
   c) Show in what ways this instance is typical of or different from the general pattern throughout the whole text.
   
   
4. Write a trial thesis statement in which you attempt to say what is the main point of the text you're annotating and how all the instances contribute. Again, this isn't a paraphrase To write a thesis, complete either  "This annotated text shows that" or "This annotated text shows how".
   
   This isn't always easy because sometimes the instances may seem rather unrelated. But try to get something down so that you can focus your discussion. Limit yourself to a couple of sentences.
   
   To get you started, think of how the text affects your sense of the entire work (if it's drawn from one), how it makes clear some central idea, and why it comes where it does.