Hello Reader,

Highlighting is the art of calling attention to a piece of text within a large document.

How often do you highlight?

When I was in high school, I thought the right way to process any source was to highlight the important parts to check it again when the date of the exam arrives.

In University it was pretty much the same.. until I started doing research.

Highlighting felt good as I have a visual cue of how much I have read. I also knew that there were important parts marked in those 100+ papers. But when it was time to remember and reuse what I have read I got stuck.

Highlighting the literature was not helping me in making sense of multiple sources. It was also not helping me to write articles any faster.

Highlighting had failed me 🥲

Then I came in contact with the whole productivity/note-taking movement, where many people condemn highlighting.

‘Burn the highlighting pens!’ (please, don’t! Researchers love their stationery!)

It turns out there is time for highlighting and time for.. well.. not highlighting.

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Highlighting is useful if you ever want to read a source again.

Highlighting helps us to quickly skim the original source by reading only the highlighted text.

Rather than taking 3 hours reading the whole text again, you can take 3 minutes reading only the highlighting of key sentences.

Also, highlighting allows you to find specific information by following the highlight colours (purple for open questions, green for examples, orange for key contributions, etc). Although they would be better in a note or database somewhere else..

With these in mind, it is easy to see why highlighting was so useful in school days.

At that time, we could just look up some key information before going into the classroom for the exams. Highlighting was used to refresh our memories, in the same way a flashcard would.

But the problem with highlighting is:

Highlights are trapped within the original sources.

Imagine you have 100 papers to go through.. You need to make sense of them, combine the ideas into a synthesis, add your own analysis, and write down a report.

Most processes go like this:

1. Read and highlight 100 papers.
2. Forget most of what you have read.
3. Start writing a report based on these papers.
4. Have to go back through all papers to extract ideas out of them.
5. Read most papers again to remember what they actually said and how it relates to what you are doing.
6. Perform steps 3 to 5 in a state of deadline-induced panic caused by procrastinating after having “read” and highlighted 100 full papers.

Ugh, I am tired just thinking about it. I only hope it never happened to you. 👀

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If we want to revert this situation (and we do want!), it is time to take notes instead.

Notes free up ideas from their original sources.

Imagine you just copied a quote from the original source..

By doing that, you are free to:

• add that quote in a list of quotes about the same idea (to start a synthesis)
• contrast the argument against other arguments on the same idea
• create relationships between the idea in that quote and other ideas
• add your own interpretation of that quote
• connect that quote to your own projects and goals

By taking notes, you are freeing the idea from its original source so that you can create something new with it.

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Now.. if you are one of my students you may be silently screaming:

‘What!? Bianca just told someone to copy a quote!?’

If you are my student you wouldn’t, right? 😄 (be honest)

The reason why I often say you should NOT just copy a quote is because we want to have notes that represent our knowledge. That means to write ideas down in our own words, rather than blindly copying someone else’s words and calling that “our knowledge”.

In that case, quotes serve only as reference rather than “the knowledge”.

But that is a topic for another day…

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In conclusion, use highlights for quick read-through summaries and take notes for everything else.

So.. what colours of highlighters do you use?

And if you are a highlight-only type of person, will you consider giving a chance to idea notes?

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Best,
Bianca

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