The Right Way to Use Highlighters
Last updated on January 20th, 2020 at 6:12 am
Who likes to use highlighters to identify themes in their textbooks? You? Are you sure it’s a good idea? Here, we show you how using your highlighter with wild abandon can reduce the effectiveness of your exam revision, plus we share with you the right way to use highlighters.
Written by Lysette Offley
I frequently come across students with psychedelic textbooks! Undeniably beautiful, is enthusiastically and copiously highlighting your book actually serving you?
First of all, how many different colours are you using?
If you are identifying three, four or five themes, you can probably keep on top of your colour coding. But I suspect more than that, and half the time you lose track of which colour represents which theme!
It’s all too easy to get into a muddle.
Secondly, what are you planning to do with your coding once you’ve identified the themes?
Often people whip their felt pens out because it’s easier than doing real work!
Revising is hard. Your brain will feel tired if you’re doing it properly.
Your unconscious mind, which is there to make sense of the world and keep you safe and comfortable, will try to convince you that highlighting your textbook constitutes ‘revising’, because it’s oh so much easier than the real thing!
And so, it will contrive to make you feel good and avoid getting on with it!
But get on with it, you must, if you need to get the information into your head and keep it there for the exam and beyond.
Do you use your highlighter pen with wild abandon? Time to rethink that exam revision strategy! Share on X
Maybe you’re using highlighters to home in on the important stuff?
If you highlight a few elements, they will indeed stand out. But if you end up highlighting everything, nothing will stand out, will it?
So, first of all, you need to establish what it is you’re trying to achieving with your highlighters.
And then of course, you need to decide if what you’re doing with them is actually accomplishing that goal.
Here’s a great way to use highlighters to help you learn…
If you’ve read my previous articles, you will be very familiar with the idea of learning small chunks of information.
So, once you have decided which chunk of information you’re going to learn, I suggest you identify the keywords in that chunk.
From that point onward, you will focus on organising those keywords in your revision notes – in patterns and groups, putting similar ideas together and separating them from others. (See previous articles.)
While you are identifying the keywords, you might choose to underline them with a pencil, or if you enjoy using coloured pens, why not highlight them instead?
Either way, it will help your brain to notice what’s important.
As your brain is sifting through the information to find those keywords – in other words, the most important ideas – it’s having to process and assess the information.
This is a good thing!
As you organise and draw your revision notes, your brain has to actively manipulate the information, and it is that process which will have your brain make a pattern of it and send it to your long-term memory.
And that’s exactly what you want, isn’t it?
