Learning to Highlight

03/11/15

When I was first told about highlighting, I didn't really understand the purpose of it. I didn't get it. I was told to highlight the important bits, but I found way too much too be important, so most of the book ended up highlighted. Eventually, not having trouble retaining read information, and not understanding the point, I felt highlighting wasn't for me and gave up the practice.

Writing in books I felt basically the same about. It also ruined the rereadability of the text, I thought. But now that I've implemented the creation of an idea index into my book-reading habits, I feel like writing on the page, and highlighting even, could actually server me a purpose.

My idea index entries are become a lot more frequent. So much so, that sometimes there are entries for every page of small chunks of the book. Often, the idea is just a certain sentence or something a certain sentence triggered. It would be quite ideal to mark that segment of the text in this case, so when using the idea index to review the book (as I plan on doing with every book I read this year), I can pick out the exact bits relevant to the idea index entry.

Though, this is speculation on my part, and I don't have entries every page that often, and realkly I may have just been overzealous with my recent read. I may just end up crossing out many of my entries upon review.

In any case, I think I've found a reason to learn to highlight properly.