Highlighting doesn’t help you remember information.

A study in 2013 from the Association for Psychological Science found that highlighting was as effect as simply reading a text. Their finding was already well known due to the mountain of research into highlighting’s ineffectiveness.

But if you want to remember more of what you read, here is what you should do instead .

When you finish a section, summarize what you read from memory

This is based on the 3R techniques. You

• read — explains itself

• recall — write a note with a summary from memory

• review — Go back to the text and add anything you missed

It’s a simple system that takes a bit of extra up front work, but will help you remember far more.

Here’s why it works.

Summarizing exercises your memory, helping you remember more

If you want to get better at something, you need to do it!

Remembering information is just the same, but most memory “practices” don’t actually test our memory. If you make notes as you read, you don’t practice remembering.

Summarizing from memory helps practice finding the information inside your brain.

You can still highlight if you want

Although highlighting doesn't help you remember information, I still highlight for other reasons.

• Finding pithy quotes later

• Importing key passages to my PKM system

• A force of habit.

  So by all means, keep highlighting if you want to. But start summarizing if you want to remember more.