Highlighting skills

WHEN you’re reading a book or preparing study notes for exam cramming, highlighting can be a huge asset. Here are some tips and tricks to make the most of your highlighting.

Print your lecturer’s notes or slides and take them into class with you: When the lecturer up front says, “This is important,” whip out the highlighter and mark the section. It’s bound to be essential for an assignment or come up in the final test.

If you’re working from a textbook, and you’re a book lover who thinks highlighting the written work is a desecration, photocopy the pages covered in each lecture and mark those up.

Colour code: When marking up notes, use a yellow highlighter for important as that’s the most attention-attracting colour, and use light colours like orange and pale blue, pink and green to distinguish stuff you have to look into more, that will come up in exams, that belong to a particular category of information in your course, or that are useful for a particular assignment.

Avoid dark colours: Darker blues, greens and purples are very attractive but they also tend to obscure text. If you’re alert and in good light, it’s not a problem. But when you’re tired (like the night before the exam) you don’t want to be straining your eyes to see what’s important.

Don’t go nuts: At some point it will seem that everything in the notes and everything in the book is vitally important. Resist the temptation to highlight whole paragraphs and pages.

The idea of the highlight is to identify key phrases and concepts. When you look at these, they should spur your memory so that you remember what’s written around those terms. As a rule of thumb, you should be highlighting roughly 10% to 20% of any text.