Do you want to improve your grade? Do you feel like highlighting the text is a helpful way to do so? If that’s the case, then it’s time for you to learn how!
Highlighting text is an effective way to pay attention to important topics and key points in the exam. And to get good grades, using a highlighter pen is necessary. But if you cannot highlight it properly, it will have just the opposite effect on your grade.
In this article, we’ll discuss how to use a highlighter pen effectively so that it doesn’t backfire and hurt your grade point average instead of helping with it! We’ll also go over the benefits using a highlighter can bring.
Benefits of Using Highlighter Pens
A highlighter pen not only helps you to highlight text but also has some other benefits. So, before learning how to use highlighter pens, you must know the benefits of using them. Let’s move forward to the advantages of using this tool.
Saves Your Valuable Time
As a student, time is of the essence. Figuring out how to use a highlighter marker to your advantage will save you an incredible amount of time you could use for other activities. That’s why it’s one of the great tools not only for students but for anyone that enjoys reading.
Thanks to the highlighter marker, you can extract the most informative parts of a long text. Once highlighted, you’ll know what part of the book has the information you need, which allows you to pick up where you left off at the last time exactly.
Naturally, these tools serve more than one purpose. Choosing several colors of different highlighters is helpful to keep track of quotes and informative sentences, as long as you use each marker wisely.
Add a few regular highlighters to your art supplies, and you’ll quickly realize how efficient those tools can be.
Determines the Important Part
Let’s face it: more often than not, books have many words that don’t really mean anything if you take a closer look at them. If you look deeply, you may find that what you need is within a single sentence in a paragraph of more than five lines.
And the good quality highlighter pen helps you ditch what’s unnecessary to let you focus on what is truly important for your purposes. That’s the reason why it’s such a valuable tool for students and book readers.
What’s even better is that there are many highlighter markers available. You get to choose the size and color of your preference, which is great because you’ll feel comfortable while highlighting and reading the text afterward.
With these tools, there are no more excuses to miss the most essential parts of a text. As long as you do it correctly, highlighting important points improve your reading experience significantly.
Improves the Quality of Your Notes
There may come a time when we misjudge the purpose of highlighters. Sometimes, as students, we consider that highlighting the text is better and more accessible than taking our own notes.
However, that’s far from being true. If anything, students should use both learning methods altogether.
You can use the highlighter marker to bring up the most important bits of each paragraph and then use that information to take your own notes. By doing that, you get better processing and understanding of the information you just read.
It means as a student you should practice note-taking system and write in your own words besides highlighting.
Utilizing these tools to take your own notes indeed makes a big difference in your learning skills. After all, everyone has a different thought process; what may be important information for someone may not be essential for you.
Using the highlighter marker is an incredible advantage because it allows us to study at our own rhythm. Even you can fix it if the ink dried out to get back to work in no time.
Helps You Memorize
Are you planning on doing a presentation in the foreseeable future? Being in the spotlight requires plenty of preparation to make the best of our designated time as we try to captivate the audience.
Since you’ll have to memorize much information for those particular moments, having specific keywords will help you remember essential information on the topic at hand.
It’ not only for presentation, it’s true for your test preparation also. Precisely, that’s another opportunity when having a highlighter marker comes in very handy.
With the highlighter marker, you’ll have the tools to select specific words in a text to help you memorize things faster and taking notes.
Not only that, but these exact words highlighted previously during the preparation will keep you on the right track during your presentation or exam.
You can see that these markers are used for a lot of stuff to improve your grades. Even if you’re no longer a student, the marker is helpful for many other activities.
How to Use Highlighter Pen
As you have already known the benefits of highlighter markers, it’s time to learn the proper ways to use them. So, how do you use the highlighter pen correctly? Here’s how you do it.
Choose the Right Tools
Highlighter pens may not seem like a big deal, but there’s much thought put into them. Considering that the competition is tough, brands want to improve the performance of their markers by taking care of old issues that gave people much trouble.
While looking for one of these markers, the color is important to make sure the ink won’t bleed through the paper. Although plenty of companies will say that their markers don’t bleed, reality may show differently. It’s up to you to be fully aware of both the advantages and disadvantages.
If you’re planning to buy online, consider all the options before making your decision. Choosing the right tip is another important factor while going for any brand.
Mostly there are two tip types of highlighters – fine tip and chisel tip. Among these two, chisel tips yellow highlighter pens are the most popular ones.
Though there are different reasons for its popularity, you must choose the tips and colors according to your need.
Highlight on Second Reading
While first reading, regardless of what the topic may be, we often consider everything is important. From the first sentence, which serves as an introduction, to the last one, which is more or less a conclusion, every word seems essential.
Using the highlight marker during the first read is a bad idea because it sometimes takes another read for us to grasp the point of said text.
That’s why you must not panic while note-taking if you don’t know what to highlight at first. So, re-reading is a must. Take your time and read the text as many times as needed until you figure it out.
During the second or third read, you’ll notice some keywords that tie the paragraph together.
Spotting these particular words and highlighting them will help you save a lot of time if you have to come back at a later moment.
Choose Colors Carefully
Depending on the text ink and page color, you just need to choose the highlighter colors accordingly. There are so many different colors available for the highlighter. Among them, fluorescent colors like – yellow, mild yellow, neon yellow, golden yellow, green, blue, pink, orange, and purple are examples.
Whether you choose the standard highlighter colors or unique colors, always be careful about the paper type. Another suggestion is that common highlighter colors are easy to remove from paper (if you need to erase the color someday).
Limit Your Color Palette
We use the highlighter pen for many reasons. On some occasions, the highlighted text will help us finish an essay, or perhaps we do it because we have to explore it further.
Whatever the case may be, as long as you highlight the text for more than one reason, you could use different colors.
However, don’t let yourself get carried away. Use what’s necessary. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a book that looks like a sketchbook more than anything else.
So, color coding is an essential factor while highlighting. But it’s not a wise decision to use too many colors at a time. Using many highlighters will leave you in a dilemma, and you won’t have any idea why you highlighted those sentences in the first place.
Using highlighter pens of many colors isn’t convenient, but using a ton of different colors isn’t helpful either. What to do, then? Create a system!
Figure out what you want to highlight and assign a code to it. For instance, use yellow for sentences worth investigating, pink for a text that you want to review later, and so on.
Additionally, you could try sticking a piece of paper on the highlighter pens with its purpose writing over it.
Use Annotation
Annotations are the short notes that can be added to your text using a highlighter pen. Annotations provide extra information, which is relevant for understanding and remembering what you have read.
For example – it can be definitions, meaning, key terms, questions, and connections to your highlighted text. It helps your highlighting to enrich. In fact, it allows you to improve your academic performance.
Follow Different Ways
Only using a highlighter marker to cover the text can be monotonous and decrease the quality of your note. In some cases, it happens that you need to highlight a lot of essential parts within one para. And if you just cover line by line with your highlighters, then it looks pretty odd.
So, you can use different styles of highlighting to create a unique look. For example – you can cover the text, underline the important points, make a box around the keywords, and so on. Beetle tip highlighters provide double lines, which is also one of the great ideas for highlighting.
However, you have to keep track of what each style means to you. Otherwise, it can be a problem while reading and writing.
Try Setting Limits
The main problem people create by over-highlighting. It not only makes your notes look dull but also doesn’t help you at all while studying. When you open a book and notice that the maximum lines of a page are highlighted, you’ll lose interest in reading.
So, try to set a limit, if possible. It’s like, highlight one or two sentences in each paragraph. If you need more, then use the styles mentioned above.
It doesn’t seem essential that how much you highlight instead how quality you have maintained.
Do Active Studies
The primary purpose of using a highlighter pen is to focus on the key concepts. But it cannot be a substitute for your study. How much highlighter do you use if you don’t study hard and practice tests, then all your highlighting will go in vein.
So, to improve academic performance, there is no alternative to study hard. Highlighter pens only help you to study effectively.
Our Recommended Highlighted Pen
To save you some trouble, we’ve handpicked a set of highlighter pens that perform well, with little to no disadvantages at all. So, let’s have a look at the set before making any decision.
Zebra Pen Mildliner Double Ended Highlighter Set
If you are looking for highlighters that will serve for your study purpose, this will be a good to go set. And luckily, you can use this set for coloring your drawing also. As you are getting 15 pens at a time, it will keep you away from buying new ones for a long time.
You are getting both chisel and bullet tip together in this set. So, these will easily fit for versatile uses. Now, you can imagine how useful this set is for your study as well as for drawing.
You will get 15 water-resistant and vibrant colors. And the colors also dry quickly providing a smooth finish. Overall, it’s a great deal!
Zebra Zebrite Highlighter Marker
This set of pens is everything you can expect from a successful highlighting of your text material. That’s why it’s one of the best highlighter pens you can hope for. You’ll find five pieces of pens varying in color between yellow, pink, orange, green, and blue. With a fine bullet and medium chisel tip, you can use the pens with high precision.
Each one of the pens offers vibrant colors to highlight your preferred sentences. Whether you’re studying or preparing your grading papers, these highlighter pens are very convenient for either task because they don’t bleed through the pages.
The construction is great too. For instance, the beautiful barrel features recycled materials and a useful pocket clip to keep it secure. Overall, the pens are as useful to you as they are to nature by including recycled materials for their production.
Lastly, the price is yet another reason to consider this incredible set of tools. It’s affordable for everyone, even if you have a low budget.
Finally, Before You Go!
Remember, the best highlighter pen is only useful if you know how to use it properly. Follow the tips discussed in this article and, once you learn to separate unnecessary information from useful information, you should be able to improve your grades significantly.