An Ode to Highlighting
Also published on Medium here.
This morning, I started reading the book First You Write a Sentence by Joe Moran. It is an elegant love letter to the English sentence, and a valuable book for any writer.
And this is how he defines his object of affection:
A sentence is a small, sealed vessel for holding meaning.
I thought it was a wonderfully succinct definition and so I did what one normally does in these situations: I highlighted the sentence. (Fig. 1) Over the course of the next few minutes and pages, I continued highlighting parts of the book that I thought were worth highlighting.
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Here (Fig. 2) is a seemingly normal highlight, but look at the liberties I take with that second sentence. I decide that only the first half is important to me, disobeying the rules of punctuation and treating the comma like a full stop. Even after the split however, my highlight is still a complete sentence, but it’s left behind a phrase without a verb.
Here (Fig.3) is my first instance of two separate but related highlights. The “he” in the second highlight is “Wendell Berry”, which is my first highlight. Because I wanted to highlight a quote in the book, I want to give credit where it’s due. In fact, I highlight “Wendell Berry” after I highlighted the quote.
And this time, I decide that just highlighting is not enough. The rest of the page contains an interesting analogy between farming and writing that I want to point out to myself. But it’s too much to highlight, so I leave myself a sticky note.
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
I can weight highlights by how much ink I invest on them. The quote at the bottom of the page (Fig. 4) was particularly poignant, so it gets a full highlight. Despite it being a quote, this time, I leave out the “he writes” and ignore the author of the quote, for reasons that neither I nor my by-thinker understand. The other paragraph would have taken a long time to fully highlight and perhaps I didn’t deem it proportionate to its importance. So it gets just a line down one side, taking up a fraction of the effort the second highlight demanded.
This (Fig. 5) is another highlight that doesn’t deserve a full highlight, but is important enough to get a box instead of just a line down one side. Because the highlight is split across two pages, the top and bottom of the boxes have the bottom and top open, respectively; this is to ensure that I know that they belong together.
As I sat across the table from my flatmate later in the day, I noticed that she’d been highlighting too. She is a business student, preparing for her exams and writing her bachelor’s thesis. Her highlights look like this:
Fig. 6
These two sets of highlights don’t have to be in different colours for us to see that they were done by different people. I am usually interested in complete thoughts and sentences and my highlights reflect that. I highlight in sentences and paragraphs.
My flatmate, on the other hand, is interested in just the key ideas of the sentence, often just the nouns. She distills a complete paragraph on that second page to just:
Typology of audience motivations: ‘diversion’; personal relationships; personal identity; ‘surveillance’.
Efficient and effective.
Highlighting is a way of actively allocating attentional resources to written material. Watching myself highlight — in other words, paying attention to paying attention — makes me realise how complex and whimsical our consciousness is, how mercurial. How outrageous is it that I judge the content of this book beyond the already heavy editing that a book goes through before being published? This is what we do with all of the information we receive. However beautiful and complete the input is, we still parse and filter our way through the world.
I suppose it is a good thing that we treat our attention as a scarce resource. After all, even the English phrase “to pay attention” is so transactional — as if our attention must be accounted for, as if the books must be balanced.
One last morsel of food for thought: The German phrase for the same action however is jemandem Aufmerksamkeit schenken , which literally translated, is “to gift someone attention”, which I feel is such a welcome diversion from the English attitude towards attention.
Also published on Medium here.
