Curious about people’s annotation styles. I typically use a yellow and pink highlighter to distinguish between interesting/relevant points (yellow) and really key takeaways (pink), and I also sometimes write notes in the margins.
Does anyone use multiple highlighting colors representing different items? (Quotations, things you disagree with, etc?)
Thanks:)
Comments
I do this but with more highlighter colors, corresponding colored tabs, and lots of marginalia. But I’m neurotic.
I don’t use colors, but I use different shapes. Regular underlining for things I think are important. Squiggly underlining for stuff I disagree with or think is questionable (with a margin note elaborating). A longer chunk I want to call out but isn’t super important or quotable will get a vertical line down its side (again, squiggly if I have a problem with it), and a smaller chunk may get a bracket within that to denote that it’s the core of the chunk. (Of course, specific lines within the chunk may also get the regular underlining treatment.) For points that are important but nothing new to me, I put a small checkmark in the margin just as a “yup, got it, moving on,” which is very helpful when I go back to reread. I write notes in the margins a lot as thoughts come to me, whether that’s just the name of another work I’m connecting to this one or a project I’m working on or something more extensive.
If something on the page is extra important, I’ll underline it, draw a star next to it in the margin, and dog-ear the page. If it’s really super duper important, I’ll do all that and draw another star on the dog-ear flap. This makes it a lot easier to find things again.
I only really do this manually with books, though (hence the dog-earing). Articles I read digitally. I do pretty similar things to my PDFs, slightly adjusted for what Preview will allow.