Highlight Main Ideas

As a tool, highlighting can be extremely helpful when it's used in a way that complements its bright, eye-catching quality. Highlighting just the author's key points will definitely make them stand out when we go over the text again later, allowing us to efficiently review what kinds of claims the historian made and how the work is organized. As we go along, targeting just the main points will also help us more actively consume the text as we continually look for the author's bigger, overarching ideas. We'll get a better bird's-eye view of the scholarly work. One strategy I like to follow is to find the line or lines which best summarize each paragraph's ideas or those of the coming paragraphs. These often take the form of short clauses within more complex, descriptive sentences, so the situation may call for smaller highlights which contain just the key sections.

Let's highlight the Restall excerpt with this in mind:

Drawing the Line