The Death & Rebirth of Highlighting
Death to highlighting... Long live highlighting!
One way to take a passive process of reading and make it more active is by making reading marks or marginalia.
It seems that there are two (at times conflicting) goals to the creation of marginalia:
Improve understanding
"Beautify" (I need a better word for this) the text so that it's more approachable later when you revisit it.
Highlighting (and underlining) is overrated. Readers don't understand or remember most of what they mark down this way. There isn't enough cognitive effort. The main goal of highlighting, then, should be to mark down sections you want to revisit later.
Christian of Zettelkasten blog writes:
Highlighting and writing notes in the margin only is too superficial. Highlighting everything like a madman doesn’t yield better understanding by itself, and when the notes are in the margin only, you will need to look at the book to retrieve your own thoughts every time. That’s highly inefficient.
Instead, write about the interesting stuff in your own words, to avoid the risk of not understanding what the text is about; put unobtrusive marks into the page margin to aid the eye when you scan a page for useful pieces later. Write down interesting parts of a text immediately on a sheet of paper. These notes will help processing the text as a whole later, when you’re done with reading.
What we see here is a "bridge" or intermediate process that happens between reading and holistic understanding. Christian is talking about converting a book into more workable material (marginalia & text notes), which will help us be a lot more effective when we revisit later.
Another problem with highlights is that they're empty of context. In the past, I'd often get excited, underline or highlight something, and then come back and have no clue why I did something. Now, I add comments (on digital) or sticky notes with a big of context that tells me why I found the text relevant.
From Some Tips for Reading Difficult or Challenging Material:
Every time you reach for your highlighter - INSTEAD, stop, think, and write yourself a note in the margin, or on a separate sheet of paper if you don't want to mark the book (sticky notes work well if you don't want to write in a book). The note should say exactly what you were thinking when you went to highlight the material. For example: "this 'idea' is important because...." or "this word means...." You will find that these little notes to yourself mean much more when you come back to review the text than streaks of highlighter.
Reading indexes
Since one of our main goals is to organize our text so that it is more approachable when we revisit it later, it can help to categorize your reading marks.
For example, you can separate things into (1) things you want to look up, (2) books you want to read, (3) ideas you don't understand, (4) ideas you want to criticize, (5) ideas you want to integrate, and so on.
What and how many marks you use will depend on your reading goals.
Below is a placeholder section for looking at some examples of reading systems.
Christian's system for reading academic texts:
I circle terms which are being defined and write a
Dfor Definition in the margin.When the author elaborates a model, I put an
Morμin the margin and maybe highlight key terms she uses.If I spot an argument, I put an
Aorαin the margin and sometimes draw a vertical line in the margin to designate the passage.Everytime I find a weakness in the argument or disagree due to a different starting point, I put a bolt glyph in the margin.
Thoughts on phones and e-readers
Some quick thoughts:
You can still do a lot of this stuff on your phone. The Kindle app for your smartphone lets you (a) add comments and (b) change the color of your highlights. So (in theory), it would be possible to do a lot of this.
It's a lot harder for e-ink readers because (a) the keyboards are so clunky and (b) there's no color-coding. I've yet to come up with a good solution for this—and this part of the reason I don't like reading non-fiction on e-ink readers.
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