Having the right 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 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.

When marking up notes, use a yellow highlighter as that’s the most attention-grabbing colour, and use light colours like orange and pale blue, pink and green to distinguish things 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.

Colour code:

Darker blues, greens and purples are attractive but they also tend to obscure text. If you’re alert and sitting in a well-lit place, it’s not a problem. But when you’re tired, you don’t want to strain your eyes.

Avoid dark colours:

At some point, it will seem that everything in the notes and everything in the book is 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.

Don’t overdo it: