new highlight methods from reading all about love

last year, i read bell hooks’ all about love. i’m still reeling from the number of ways that it changed my life, but one of them is that it totally changed my “highlight” game (and by highlight i really mean just markup)! i’ve never read a book that i wanted to highlight so much. some times i would mark entire pages.

early on in the book, these excess markup needs made my pages look really sloppy. eventually, i evolved into the system you can see in the below page. there are a few things that either aren’t visualized here or that i figured out later, but here are the elements:

• underline: reserved for marking anything from a phrase up to an entire sentence, but no more than a sentence.
• sideline: for marking section. sidelines can be stacked. if like lines 4-10 on the page, but lines 4-6 especially stand out, i’ll mark both. in effect, lines 4-6 appear double-sidelined.
• multi-page sideline: a dotted sideline that begins and ends with square brackets indicates that the section marked continues onto the next/previous page.
• exclamation points: one means the section marked needs to go into my quote repository. two means it’s social media worthy. three means the quote changed my worldview/life.

that’s what i’ve got for now. will probably continue to evolve.

ps - tbc, sometimes the pages still end up looking a little sloppy, but at least they’re legible in hindsight, heh.