highlighting season

I am buried in reading these days and recently found myself amused at the growing number of highlighters that I find I NEED to carry around in my backpack. For awhile, I had specific colors for specific classes that more or less matched the color of the class reader. But lately I couldn't stand it and decided I needed a change because I couldn't find the articles I had just finished...all the blurry, sideways, xeroxed print looked the same. I never knew where I was supposed to be. I've since spiced up my reading with my own "array" (*see below).

Here's a little professional comment on my situation:

"I had seen highlighters before, I just hadn't understood what they were for. I though of them, quite simply, as yellow Magic Markers, objects for which I had little use... It certainly wouldn't have occurred to me to mark up my books with them, or with any other writing instruments...
"But then I got to college, where I suddenly found myself surrounded by an army of people wielding yellow highlighters, carefully illuminating the crucial passages in their reading; the main ideas, the provocative metaphors, the striking epigrams. Some highlighted judiciously, selecting only a key word here and there, while others did it wantonly, scribbling furiously over whole paragraphs. One of my freshman roomates used a ruler to keep his highlights straight; another guy I knew kept an array of highlighters at the ready to color code his texts for handy reference at exam time.
"By the end of my first semester, I was already hooked...I had improvised a byzantine system involving highlighter, underlines, and marginal punctuation marks. What a truly major passage looked like is hard to re-create, though I can report that the people who sat next to me in seminar often felt the need to comment on my thoroughness.
"In the end, my reading process had been warped into a strange kind of inventory taking, in which I was forced to divide the book into miniscule units, weighing the present sentence against all sentences that had come before, trying to find a place for it in my mysterious and ever-shifting hierarchy of classification. A more reasonable person might have simply declared a moratorium on highlighting, but that struck me as the coward's way out, hardly better than not reading at all."

~Tom Perotta, from Joe College