Handy highlighting skills

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

Pay attention in class

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

If you are using a textbook and are a book lover who thinks that highlighting written works is a desecration, photocopy the pages covered in each lecture and mark those instead.

Colour code

When marking notes, use a yellow highlighter for important sections as it is the most attention-attracting colour.

Use light colours like orange and pale blue, pink and green to distinguish information 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 may be pleasing to the eye, but they also tend to obscure text.

If you are alert and in a well-lit area, this is not a problem. But when you are tired, such as on the night before an exam, you do not want to be straining your eyes.

Don’t go overboard

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 is written around those terms. As a rule of thumb, you should be highlighting roughly 10 to 20% of any text.