- Text marking:
marking or annotating our text as we read.
We know that we should do it,
but we don't always know
why we should do it.
We're going to talk a little bit now
about why we mark our text and
how to make those notations
as effective as possible.
We mark our text when we read
for three primary reasons.
First, we're trying to distinguish
between different types
of information in our reading.
In particular, we're trying to zero in
on information that matters
versus information that doesn't matter,
information that we need to spend time
remembering and studying
versus information that
we can overlook or ignore.
The second thing we do
is we create a guide
through our marking for
future study of the material.
You can think about your
annotation of a text
as a kind of trail of
breadcrumbs for your future self.
When you encounter that material later,
you'll have a much clearer
path for studying it
because you've been there already,
and you've left markers for yourself.
Finally, we mark our text
because we're trying to make it
more manageable in the future,
particularly when the
information is very complex
or when there's a massive amount of it.
In order to make it more manageable,
we mark it so that we can
get a better grasp of it
the second time around.
So, when we're thinking about
a system for marking our text,
we want our system to do three things.
We want it to distinguish immediately
between different types of information,
in other words, to help
us figure out what matters
and what doesn't.
Second, we want it to make our
future study of the material
as efficient as possible,
and thirdly, we want it
to make our material,
especially complex or abundant material,
more manageable in the future.
The primary technologies
that we use to do this
are underlining and highlighting.
You do this in middle school,
high school, and into college.
You highlight things that are important,
or you underline them.
But today, I want to problematize the idea
of underlining and
highlighting as a technology
for marking our text in
the most efficient way.
The problems with highlighting
and underlining are manifold.
The first problem is
that when you highlight
or you underline something,
you create a binary category.
You create two types of information:
information that matters and
information that doesn't.
And even though that's what
marking is supposed to do,
the material that we encounter in college
is going to be more
sophisticated than that,
so we may need to be able
to mark our text in a way
to identify all kinds of
importance or relative importance,
rather than just importance
or non-importance.
And that's not really possible
with highlighting or underlining.
We automatically split
the text into things
that matter and don't,
things that we should learn or not learn.
Second, the process
itself is time-consuming.
If we have to highlight
an entire paragraph,
it can take 30 seconds or even a minute,
adding precious time
to our reading process,
which is already time-consuming.
We also find, especially
with dense material
or technical material,
that we over highlight
or over underline.
If you have an entire page
of text that's highlighted,
it doesn't really help you very much.
And finally, splitting information
into only two categories
doesn't require a ton of critical thought
or cognitive effort,
and we want our annotations,
we want our text marking
to require some critical
thought for us to help us aid
in our comprehension and our
retention of the material.
Here you see a page of text
that's been underlined,
and as you can very clearly
see, it distinguishes
and separates the information
out into two categories,
literally, categories of
underlined and not underlined,
but more importantly,
information that we should learn
versus information that we can ignore.
The same thing happens with highlighting,
two categories of information.
The information that's
missing, critically, from this
is how important these
different highlighted pieces
of information are
relative to one another.
That's the information that
we want our marking system
to try to capture.
The system I propose here does just that.
I call it the one-two-three
marking system,
a series of strokes next to your text
that not only tells you
that that text is important,
but gives you an immediate indication
of how important it is.
One stroke being this information
will probably be useful,
I should try to remember
it if I have time;
two strokes meaning this is
important, I need to learn this;
three strokes being this
is a key concept or idea,
I should understand this fully
and be able to talk about it
without the use of my
notes or my textbook.
Another way to think about this:
One, this information is cool,
it might strengthen an essay,
or it's something I'd like to remember.
Two, I should probably learn this material
if I have enough time.
Three, I need to prioritize this material
because it's key, it's important,
and I need to understand it fully.
I've even added a fourth
set of strokes here
for information that
the professor tells you
will be on the exam.
You see the system at work here.
It's not that much different
than underlining or highlighting,
except that in a single glance,
you can tell not only what's important,
but how important the information
is relative to each other.
You can see, for example, at
the very bottom of the page,
a very, very important point,
probably a point that would
be worthy of an exam question
or an essay question.
And here you see that there's been
an additional annotation made.
This system allows for annotations
in the margins as well.
The benefits of the system are manifold.
One, as I've said, it allows
you to distinguish quickly
and easily information that is important
and also how important
that information is.
It essentially gives you a kind of signal
of the amount of importance
that a particular piece
of information has.
Two, the system gives you a sense
of how important information
is relative to each other
at a single glance.
You don't have to spend
time rereading the material
to understand how important it is.
Next, the marking system
can be practiced easily
and allows for easy alteration.
So, if you were to highlight
an entire paragraph
and then realize that the
paragraph wasn't as important
as you thought, it would be very difficult
to un-highlight that paragraph.
But if you were to write three
strokes next to a paragraph,
and then realize the paragraph
isn't that important,
you could very easily alter
that to a single stroke,
alerting you to the fact that
it's worthy of remembering,
but not of key critical importance.
It also, again, allows
for easy annotation.
You can add additional
words next to your strokes
to help you identify why a piece
of information is important
or to register a question that you have.
And finally, when you're
annotating your text in this way,
you have no more bleeding
highlighters through the page,
you have no more stray underline
strokes crossing out words.
It also works really well on
print on double-sided paper.
A couple of additional things to remember:
One, if you're using heavily
marked textbooks already,
I would encourage you not to
and to try to find a less used copy.
When textbooks are
heavily used before you,
one, you don't know what
kind of a marking system
that person was using,
and two, you don't know
that they were looking
for the same things you were looking for,
so their markings may throw you off.
Two, your marking system should help you,
not hinder you.
If your marking system is
adding substantial time
to your reading practice, try
to evolve it or iterate it
to make it more streamlined.
Again, your annotation process should only
add seconds or minutes, not hours.
And finally, if you have a
marking system that's different
from this one, and it's working for you,
and you're getting the results
that you want, keep doing it.
