- Mar 2022
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blog.readwise.io blog.readwise.io
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Even though your highlights from books typically include a page or "location" number, this context is largely meaningless unless you happen to be writing a paper requiring proper citations.
Page numbers are terrible for anything other than looking up a location or citing where a quote is from, it provides little meaningful organizational context.
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blog.readwise.io blog.readwise.io
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consistent use of the concatenate action tag will elevate your reading practice to the next level. Analyzing a text to decide what is and isn't worth saving is a form of actively engaging with what you're reading.
Identifying what parts of a highlight are important and which are superfluous is another aspect of active reading.
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when everything is highlighted, nothing is highlighted
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Verbose highlights are painful to review
Highlights that are too long however are painful to review. There's a balance to providing just enough context.
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As you develop the habit of revisiting your highlights, you'll increasingly start to think in terms of your future self. As you highlight, for example, you might starting asking: Will my future self be able to understand what this passage is saying and why I highlighted it? To ensure your future self has enough context, you might then also take much longer highlights.
To become a more proficient active reader who uses highlighting effectively you need to think about what contextual information will be required for comprehension when you review annotations in the future. Longer highlights may be required.
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blog.readwise.io blog.readwise.io
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Not only does inline tagging make it easy to add keywords and categories to your highlights, consistent use will also elevate your reading practice to the next level. Distilling a highlight down to a single keyword or forging an association between a passage and something you're working on are both forms of actively engaging with what you're reading. And actively (rather than passively) reading is essential to getting more of what you want out of books
Adding keywords isn't just to make finding things easier later on, the act of associating a highlight with a keyword or linking it to a project through a tag elevates your reading to be active rather than simply passive.
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