Best Ways to Comment While Reading

Annotating your textbooks or other study materials is a great way to help you remember what they say—it forces you to read critically and pay attention. Unfortunately, if you don’t do it right, you won’t get as many benefits as you should. Here are the right (and wrong) ways to annotate.

Use colors to annotate

Just as you should color-code your notes , you should color-code your annotations. A plain black pen is fine for writing in the margins, but switching the colors of the pen or highlighter will help you quickly identify different elements of the text. This can be as simple as using a red pen to highlight concepts you don’t understand and want to study deeper later, or as complex as using a yellow highlighter for vocabulary words, pink for general topics, orange for proofs and etc.

Assigning a meaning to each color and sticking to it will help you retain information and make it much easier to review.

Don’t underline words when annotating

Instead of just highlighting anything notable, use symbols. The University of North Carolina Study Center suggests using universal symbols that you already know, such as a question mark when you’re confused about something or an exclamation point when you know something will be on a test.

Even if you don’t have different markers and pens, using different symbols to represent different ideas will help you keep everything organized. Try, for example, circling new words, drawing squiggles under unfamiliar words, and underlining key concepts. This will keep you more engaged as you read rather than just highlighting as you go.

Summarize what you read, but not too much.

When annotating, you need to summarize what you’ve read in the margins of the page. (If you don’t have the book you’re working on, you can use a separate document for this, but be sure to paste it into the book so you always have it with your source material.) Try using GIST. If you find it difficult to write summaries because you absolutely need to be concise. Summarizing is a great way to cut down all the new information and leave yourself with only the most important concepts needed to understand it, but it’s easy to get carried away and write too much. This is not as useful as reading critically and highlighting key elements. This is why using margins is useful: you have limited space. Try summarizing the main idea of ​​each page in the margins, and then summarizing the chapter when you reach the end.

Don’t highlight or mark too much when annotating.

There is such a thing as too much attention. Highlighting is actually a hot topic on teaching forums and blogs, as educators worry that by spending too much time on highlighting, students aren’t doing enough critical thinking to determine what’s worth and what’s not worth swiping across. fluorescent marker. However, there is an opinion that markers are useful if used thoughtfully and carefully. Only remove the cap from this marker if you are highlighting something valuable that you will return to later, such as a new idea, a vocabulary word, or a piece of information that you know is on the test. Don’t mark entire sentences or passages, but instead focus only on what is most important in them.