The Art of Highlighting
For many years I never really understood the point of highlighting markers. Or why some people preferred highlighting while others wrote notes. But blame it on my youth. As I grew and read more, I learned to read between the lines of notemaking as well. I thought I’d post some of the highlights (pun not intended) of this art — and it is an art — as I wish someone would have done for me when I was younger.
I distinctly remember that I fully understood that highlighting/taking notes was about turning a large chunk of text into a short, descriptive summary. That’s exactly what it is of course, but there’s a lot more to it. There’s an art to identifying what to summarize. To be able to read over a large chunk of text, put it into context with your goals (or emphases, or your instructor’s emphases, or other) and then using that to find the shortest sentences possible that yet say as much as possible: that’s the art. A skill that can (unfortunately) only be developed by practice and more practice.
A Problem
There are no specific how-to’s on how to filter out what’s important, as it depends on multiple factors. One was mentioned before (emphasis), another is the field of study – there’s a difference between reviewing a novel as opposed to a book on artificial intelligence. An added issue is the form of presentation; are we taking notes from a lecture, or a book, or a movie, an article, a presentation, webpage or a blog entry? Each of these tend to follow different writing styles (including author-specific writing styles) and hence, in addition to what your study interests are, no specific recipe can be universally applied to filter out the juicy bits.
A Solution
What you can do is realize up front what it is you’re interested in summarizing and consciously apply yourself throughout the reading/lecture/other to find correlations with your topics of interest. Don’t take it for granted that the author has already put his material forth in a manner which fleshes out the good parts. Critically examine the text and you’ll soon realize that often the writer treats remarkable information like trash — and leaves many things out completely. Sometimes this is inadvertently, or due to lack of space, but more often because his interest and way of thinking differ from yours.
More Solutions
After having read more than a few books, articles and other literature; I’ve developed a basic repertoire of how I take notes. Below is the general layout of my Scientific Research Mode, but is useful to many others nonetheless. I find that to do a basic review of something, I need at least three types of pens. These are:
- A Yellow Highlighting Marker
- An Orange Highlighting Marker
- A Black, regular pen
The yellow highlighter I use for highlighting what I find really interesting. The orange highlighter I use for things that I need to examine more closely, think about, or what bothers me. Finally, the pen is for writing down questions, thoughts and ideas that I think of while reading.
I recently discovered that a rather useless fashion object had academic value in this context: I started using a wristband (or a sweatband) for storing the pens while reading (see picture above). Really useful, as you don’t have to continually recap the suckers, misplace them or even take your eyes of the text to use them. For any university student, this is the bomb. A small sidetrack: Did you know Wikipedia has an entry on wristbands? For deeper exploration than basic reviews, taking notes in a notebook would additionally be the way to go, with added references to other works and the whole package.
Some minor tips are (1) highlight text, when there’s other non-important stuff in between, so that it can be read as a sentence, skipping the details. (2) Take notes when the text is too long to waste your precious yellow-highlighting ink on, summarizing it from the original. (3) When you use the orange “I Wonder?” marker, add a short blurb on the side explaining what your beef is.
Obviously, honing your skills at identifying what’s important or interesting will increase your productivity manifold. Becoming adept at quickly identifying the essence of texts will help you understand the rest of what you’re reading more easily, simultaneously making it easier to remember. We live in a time where information is basically overflowing – effective summarization is vital to get an overview of what’s available out there. And then to gain deeper understanding of the material you wish to inspect further.
This has been my highlighting the Art of Highlighting. I hope you found it useful. Feel free to share more thoughts and tips on this subject as comments.
RSS feeds are basically everywhere now, and for a good reason. It can be a really powerful tool for those who want to be savvy on the news, but don’t have much time to browse their thousands of bookmarks.
Here’s a little analogy: Imagine reading and managing your e-mail in a menu that displays contacts and their emails; e.g. John Hilbert (2 new mails). Clicking on the contact displays a list of the most recent emails from the person. Not very intuitive, is it? At least not when you’ve got hundreds of contacts. Kind of like going through the writings of a million monkeys. Well, using a browser for RSS feeds is similar, in my opinion — it works, but is of limited use. Using a Reader application (desktop or an online service, see below) is a much more efficient way to stay savvy and sane at the same time.
Microsoft released their MS Robotics Studio yesterday, which I applaude, but of course have my issues with because it’s Microsoft related (more on that below). The studio is “a software development kit for the robotics community that can be used with a wide variety of hardware, by a wide audience of users” says Tandy Trower, General Manager of the Microsoft Robotics Group. 
And...