Highlighting Tips

Why highlight text?

Unless you’re going to be quizzed immediately after reading (has this ever happened?), you can relax. Let’s discuss why these worries are unnecessary:

1) Expecting you’ll be able to remember everything you’ve read immediately after you’ve read it is unrealistic. Many people need more than one exposure to any kind of information in order to retain it. (Have you ever learned all the words to a song after hearing it one time?) If you don’t remember anything, you were likely distracted, and you may want to consider what you can do to reduce/eliminate distractions next time.)

2) Many people need a little time to process information they’ve learned. Again, you’re not getting asked to analyze text immediately after reading it, right? You may better understand a few hours or even a day after you’ve read it. So don’t stress about this. (This is diffent from not understanding what you’ve read. If this is the case, you probably need to re-read, but you may want to create questions to ask your professor about the reading first. Don’t wait to get help if you’re lost. You’ll get further and further behind in class, especially if new information builds on what you don’t understand.)

3) Worrying about whether you’re “getting it” or will remember what you’ve read adds another process for your brain – it’s now thinking about these concerns while you try to attend to the text.

My goal in suggesting highlighting is to free you of these concerns while you read.

I’m not ignoring what the research says of course. My guess is that research doesn’t find highlighting to be effective because students who use it haven’t been taught how to highlight or what to do with their highlights once they’re done. If you like highlighting or haven’t tried it yet, here are tips to make it a more effective process. Keep in mind that highlighting isn’t going to be effective if you just highlight your text and leave it alone until you’re preparing for a text. Below, I explain what to do with your highlights to make it part of an effective reading process.

But what about the research?

My goal in suggesting highlighting is to free you of these concerns while you read.

I’m not ignoring what the research says of course. My guess is that research doesn’t find highlighting to be effective because students who use it haven’t been taught how to highlight or what to do with their highlights once they’re done. If you like highlighting or haven’t tried it yet, here are tips to make it a more effective process. Keep in mind that highlighting isn’t going to be effective if you just highlight your text and leave it alone until you’re preparing for a text. Below, I explain what to do with your highlights to make it part of an effective reading process.

If you take notes while you read

If you end up re-reading sections where you’ve taken notes, notetaking is probably affecting your comprehension. You may be better off highlighting while you read and then returning to marked text later to create your notes.

What you should highlight

Mark anything you think might be important – it doesn’t matter if you change your mind about it later. (Remember – it’s only the first part of the process)

In non-fiction (textbooks, factual articles, case studies):

• Important facts (dates, people with significant involvement in historical events, important events)
• Any text that appears in bold or italics (formatting shows you what the writer thinks is important)
• Ideas/theories discussed
• Terms/vocabulary you don’t know
• Formulas or processes you’ll need to know

In case studies or research write-ups:

• the number of subjects (or whatever was being experimented on, like cell types)
• what was done (was it a survey? did they inject something into cells?)
• the findings (get important details from Results section, and key-take-aways from Discussion section, if there is one)

In philosophy:

• quotes that explain an idea or seem to be someone’s well-known saying

In fiction:

• quotes that illustrate something important about a character’s motivation, or that seem to represent the character’s viewpoint

In literary or art criticism:

• any artists/authors/thinkers and works this author discusses
• any statements the author makes that summarizes their thoughts on someone’s work, or the state of art, literature in general

Note – don’t switch highlighter colors as you read to emphasize different information (like vocabulary terms and their definitions). This will interrupt your reading flow and it places demands on your working memory (which will have to remember which color you use for different kinds of information). Stick to one color – you’ll organize the information later when you take notes.

How you should highlight

Highlight selectively, leaving out small words like the and an and marking only the information you need to note

See a sample of how text from the National Park Service about a debate during the Constitutional Convention might look. It’s got a lot of highlighting because it’s full of facts that may appear on a test:

Creating a set of notes is the last step in the highlighting process

The whole point of highlighting is to mark information you think might be worth remembering. But you need to do something with the text you’ve marked.

Once you’re done reading, create a set of notes from the text you highlighted that can serve as a study guide. (See Step 3 of Elizabeth’s reading strategies for tips on how to do this.) It’s okay to decide that some highlighted information isn’t worth keeping.

If you had comprehension questions to go with the reading, you may want to answer those (the answers form a study guide) and then only take notes on highlighted text you didn’t use.

As you copy over information, try to organize or group ideas and facts so that they’re connected in your mind. Your notes might look like this:

Learn more about reading strategies

Highlighting is one step in the reading process Read more of my recommended general reading strategies. And see even more in my article for ADDitude Magazine.