Our brains are remarkable organs. After all, if you were to think about all the things you have learned ever since you were born, you would be amazed at how much information you have retained. By the time you are an adult, you have decades of knowledge that you have accumulated over the years, which is quite impressive.
But here is the thing. Most of the knowledge we have stems from repetition and continuous testing and improvement. Take learning a new language, for example. We are able to do so by continuously repeating the basics until we get to a point where they are second nature to us. But if you were to learn a new language in under a week and not put it to the test or review what you had learned, you would likely forget what you had read or heard quite soon.
That is why, whether we are at work, school, or home, we are often encouraged to review what we have learned so that we can process this knowledge better. But with all the information we receive daily, it becomes quite hard to determine what is worth holding on to and what we should discard.
Web highlighting thus serves as a crucial tool to anyone who is eager to learn more while addressing these barriers to knowledge retention. Let us talk about how this tool enables readers across the globe to not only take note of what they have learned but also review it well enough to retain new information from the comfort of their devices.
What Is Web Highlighting?
If you have ever used a highlighter tool, be it a pen or pencil, then you are quite familiar with the world of highlighting. It essentially comes down to marking the sections that stand out to you the most. For example, when reading a book, you may choose to highlight some sentences that hold a lot of weight according to you.
Web highlighting is the digital version of this. This tool enables you to mark the specific sections of a webpage that are most important to you. Examples include images, sentences, or even entire paragraphs. In this way, these sections stand out based on their colors, and you can thus skim the page to zero in on these sections instead of reading the whole page again.
Let us consider how this works step-by-step.
First, you would need a web highlighting tool. Usually, these come in the form of extensions, but you can also use a reading tool with this feature or your regular browser. Next, you would select the text that you wanted to highlight using your mouse or finger. Following this, a pop-up would appear, asking you if you wanted to highlight the said text, and you would choose whether you wished to do so. Most highlighter tools will include additional features such as colors, notes, and tags, which you can rely on to further personalize the highlight. The tool would then record the text as well as its position in the original page before saving that information to the cloud under your account. After that, the background of the selected text would change to the selected color and would remain so while you scrolled the page, even during subsequent visits.
Where Do Highlights Go?
With a physical book, you know where your highlighted sections are, as you probably also include sticky notes in those pages. But what about online highlights? Well, these are even easier to access.
When you create a highlight, the web highlighter tool can store it in two ways. In the first instance, it creates an entry in your personal workspace which includes the web address, the name of the article, and so on. This way, you can refer to your highlights in the workspace, and should you wish to read the original article, you can use the web address provided. In the second case, the tool saves your highlights on the original page. As such, when you load that web address in the future, the tool checks your saved highlights and applies them to the page, enabling you to head to the saved sections.
But what if you use a different device? Web highlighting tools save your highlights to a centralized account rather than your device. That means that as long as you have synced your device to the cloud and are signed in, you can access your highlights on any device that you use, which allows you to retrieve that information whenever you need it.
How About Organization?
Creating highlights is a great way to create a library. Even so, browsing hundreds to thousands of highlights can prove to be time-consuming, which is why readers often rely on the following organization hacks:
Keywords and tags. These labels enable you to group highlights based on their topics.
Folders and collections. These allow you to separate projects to maintain a clean workspace.
Linked networks. When working with related concepts, these networks enable you to connect highlights to related ones.
Some readers also enjoy using automated smart feeds that rely on existing rules to sort new highlights. For more information about organizing and managing online highlights, explore our Web Annotation Guide.