Here’s the thing about most law students: we love our highlighters. We have the crayon type, erasable, pastel, neon, etc. No study session is complete (it might not even be started) without those colorful sticks on our desks. A lot of studies found out that highlighting is not an effective way of studying, but for law students, we have a special reason for choosing to color our study materials.
The most important reason is the large amount of information we have to study. Those textbooks that are around a thousand pages each contain a lot of things we need to understand and, most of the time, memorize. There isn’t much time to take down notes, especially for those who have jobs, so we need the most important information to pop out while we’re reviewing and/or cramming for the exams. Highlighting is also advantageous during the last year of law school when students have to study all the textbooks again. There’s not enough time to read them all cover to cover, so it’s good if there already are highlights.
Despite all these, I find that most of the time I’m studying while highlighting, I tend to go back a lot, and it would take me more time to finish a certain chapter. This is because my attention will be divided between trying to understand the material and steadying my hand to make the highlight straight. Not to mention the mental and physical work of switching between colors.
This week, I studied using only a pen, underlining or encircling important sections. My annotations were far from perfect. They’re not even clean. But I found that I was able to concentrate more on the textbook by doing so. I didn’t have to worry over perfecting my lines. I just scribbled away. Then I made notes on the chapters because I had enough time to do that, having gone through the material much faster.
I find that this method works better for me because it allows me to learn actively. Without having to switch tools, I can mark the important parts of the book and then write on a separate piece of paper those which I need to memorize.
I’m not sure if I’m going to study my textbooks using exclusively this method. I’m still going to continue highlighting cases, though. I don’t need to memorize those, and the facts need to pop out when I’m making the digests. For now, I’m going to continue using only pen or pencil. We’ll see how that goes in the long run.
Having said this, no matter what your preference is, at the end of the day, what you underlined or highlighted will not matter if you don’t understand a thing or are not able to apply it in the real world. Use whatever floats your boat. The goal here is learning, not making the textbooks look pretty. (But I can’t deny that’s fun to do.)
It's a Ping Thing 