Highlighting effectively

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.

1) Print your lecturer’s notes or slides and take to class

When a classmate 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.

2) Colour code When marking up notes, use a yellow highlighter for important as that’s the most attention attracting colour. Use light colours such as orange and pale blue, pink and green to differentiate 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.

3) Avoid dark colours Darker blue, green and purple 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 so important.

4) Don’t go nuts 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. As a rule of thumb, you should be highlighting roughly 10% to 20% of any text.