Description
It consists in highlighting, using a personal code (lines, marks, symbols, etc.) the ideas, points, details, and notes that are most important on the text.
Advantages
As you do it:
- It motivates your reading.
- It focuses your attention.
- It makes studying easier.
- It helps you understand the text.
- It helps you acquire vocabulary.
- It’s useful for distinguishing the most important ideas.
- It helps clarifying the concepts.
- It develops your analytic capacities.
- It helps you fix the information.
After you do it:
- It shortens review times.
- It makes following reviews a lot easier.
- It’s useful for making summaries and diagrams.
Applying the technique
It’s useful to do a preliminary reading to guide your work; this first reading helps you approach the text and the subject of study. If you don’t do it, everything might seem important and you might underline too much.
Applying these ideas
- Don’t underline when you do your first reading.
- Don’t underline anything that you don’t understand. Use the dictionary.
- Don’t underline too much, only the key words.
- The underlined text should have sense by itself, even if it’s not grammatically correct.
- Find the main and secondary ideas. Highlight them using different codes.
- It’s important that the underlined sections do not interfere with the reading.
- Use a ruler; it can be helpful.
- Use color-code with meaning.
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