A tried-and-true technique for active reading is underlining and/or highlighting key words and phrases in a text with a pen or highlighter. This method is valuable for two reasons:
- First, it encourages you to look for important information while you are reading, which helps to keep you focused on the main points or information.
- Second, it makes it easier to review the information you have read because you can scan the important words you have already identified rather than reread the entire text.
What do you highlight or underline in a text? When students first use active reading, they may find it difficult to decide which words and phrases to underline or highlight. All of the text may seem important, so it may be difficult to decide what to mark. Active readers should not mark all of the text because then nothing will stand out as important. Active readers mark text strategically, which means they make decisions on which words and phrases are most important.
The following is a list of information that is usually worth marking:
- Any words or phrases in distinctive typeface. If an author has put key terms in bold print or color, highlight them to make them stand out even more.
- The answers to the questions you formulated from headings or topic sentences. Read with the question in mind, and every time you discover an answer (or part of the answer), highlight it.
- Words or phrases referring to major details that develop the idea stated in each paragraph’s topic sentence. Look for and underline or highlight the main reasons, examples, or other kinds of the details provided to explain the point of the topic sentence. The topic sentence is usually the first or second sentence in a paragraph and it captures the writer’s main point of the paragraph.
The key to effective highlighting is to avoid overdoing it. Highlighting whole sentences or paragraphs is pointless because the major ideas will not stand out when you go back to the text again later. Instead, you will end up unnecessarily rereading long sections of the text. Also, highlighting whole passages will not help you focus on finding the most essential information. So concentrate on marking only those words that will help you quickly piece together the main points and key concepts of the text when you are reviewing it later.
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Content adapted from the open course titled “Open Now Developmental English” authored by Cengage Learning, licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.