How To Study With A Highlighter: The Three Pitfalls That You Should Avoid

Studying with a highlighter is a great way to make the most of your note-taking.

Or rather, it is when you do it properly.

It’s amazing how many people fall into the trap of what we call “highlighter abuse.”

They’ll use those luminous pens day-in and day-out, all the while devising increasingly elaborate highlighting systems for notes. But, all that effort is ultimately wasted and never gets them the results they’re hoping for.

Why doesn’t highlighting work for these people? They don’t know how to use a highlighter effectively.

Highlighters can transform your note-taking, but there’s a right way to use them. Using them the wrong way won’t help you with note-taking, and sometimes it will actually hinder the process.

But how do you know what the right and wrong approaches to highlighting are? Well, that’s what this article is for. These are the three pitfalls to avoid when studying with a highlighter. Take these to heart and you’ll soon be using your luminous markers like a pro.

1. Not reading the text first

We’ve taken to calling this one “panic highlighting” here at GoodNotes. As you read on, it’ll soon become apparent why.

Big mistake number 1 when it comes to highlighting is unleashing the highlighter on your first pass of a text or a document. Until you’ve actually read that chapter or article, you can’t possibly know what the important points are. As a result, you end up stabbing in the dark, trying to pre-empt what the take-home message of the text is. This means you either:

• a) End up highlighting anything and everything that you think might be relevant, resulting in a page that is more highlighter than print.
• b) End up highlighting sections that are of little relevance to your learning, confusing yourself down the line when you return to the document.

We panic highlight because we’re anxious to find the meaning of a text, we want to make sure we’ve made a note of the important information as soon as possible, so that we don’t forget it. But, usually, the opposite ends up being true.

So how do we avoid panic highlighting? Simple.

Read the text once, walk away from it, think about what the take home was and then come back to it with the highlighter for a second pass. Once you know what you’re actually looking for, you’ll be much better at picking out the important stuff and won’t end up adrift in a sea of luminous yellow.

2. Replacing highlighting with your own notes

We’ve actually covered this one here on GoodNotes before in our “6 Common Note-taking Mistakes and What You Can Do To Avoid Them” article. But, it’s such an important point that it bears repeating here.

Students sometimes think of highlighting as an easier option than taking their own notes. But this is simply not the case!

Writing your own notes is an essential part of processing and understanding information. By putting something into your own words, you’re actively digesting and making sense of that concept, as well as committing it to memory. Highlighting is a more passive process, and it doesn’t make the information stick in the same way.

As we see it, there are three main ways in which you can use highlighting to enrich your own learning:

1. To pick out the important parts of a text on which to base your own notes.
2. To identify the key parts of your own notes once they are written for your own reference.
3. If you have a text that you will need to read and re-read over a course of several years and want to remind yourself of the key concepts efficiently.

Highlighting works great with note-taking, but it is never a substitute for note-taking. Confuse the two to your own detriment!

3. Only using one highlighter

When we highlight different sections of a document, we’re usually highlighting them for different reasons.

Sometimes we highlight a statement because it’s useful to our own work; we need to remember it so we can quote it later. Sometimes we highlight a passage because we want to explore it further, or it sparks off a new idea in our head. Other times, we highlight something because we don’t agree with it, and want to question it in the course of our own research.

If you’re highlighting quotes for very different reasons, but always in the same color pen, things start to get confusing very quickly. When you revisit those notes, it’s easy to forget why you highlighted things in the first place, and your own notes quickly become impossible to decipher.

What to do instead? Use a system!

If you’re going to use highlighting, then color-coding is a must. The folks at Think Artificial suggested a useful multi-highlighter system a while back that we at GoodNotes have adopted.

It uses three types of pens — a yellow highlighting marker, and orange highlighting marker and 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.”

You don’t have to take this approach as gospel. Whatever system you decide on will depend on the kind of research or revision that you’re doing. The key takehome here is that you have a system because spending hours trying to decipher your own notes is not a good use of your time.

Highlighters are great tools, just so long as you know how to use them. What’re your experiences with highlighters? Do they help you with your revision and do you have any strategies for using them. Let us know in the comments.