What's your highlighters' color-coding system?

[The Angriest Bird]

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For me:

Yellow: everything that's important
Green: disease
Blue: drug
Purple: pathogen
Pink: symptoms + drug adverse effects
Orange: reserved for special use

 

[potato51]

for pharm...

yellow: drug name
blue: mechanism of action
green: adverse effects
orange: whatever makes particular drug different from others in its class

and to think, before MS2 I never used a highlighter in my life ;-\

 

[Flopotomist]

Highlighter color scheme? None.. I use whatever color I grab ( I don't like highlighters too much)

BUT I do use the little stickie flags.

Yellow - simple questions I am able to formulate
Red - Critical misunderstanding, I can't even formulate a question.
Blue - things to go back to memorize that I understand but don't know yet
Green - bookmarks to hold my place
Pink - divisions of major subjects

yellow red and blue go on the vertical axis, green and pink go on the horizontal.

The funny thing is my friends know my system and make comments like "looks like a lot of yellow stickies" or "Lets go through and pull stickies" (what I do when I work through my questions with my friends).

 

[notdeadyet]

Wow. I'm impressed. Personally, I think I'd need flash cards to learn these highlighter color coding systems.

 

[LifetimeDoc]

I like to keep mine extremely simple with only two colors...

Yellow: highlighted by the professor in class
Orange: stressed by the professor in class, or something where he said something like "know this for the test"

The other highlighter colors I have sit in my desk drawer.

 

[necrotic brain]

For anatomy:

pink - arteries
blue - veins
yellow - nerves
green - lymph

now, for med and surg I just stick to the yellow til it runs out >_<

 

[medicomel]

for some reason i can't get my brain to focus on what's highlighted. i take a regular old pen and underline or mark the margins. i bulletpoint my own notes and maybe star it after a second pass if i haven't understood the concept by then.

for anatomy i used the pen with four colors. you know the one, the Bic with either the blue or red barrel.

i especially hate the ugly orange highlighters

 

[lord_jeebus]

Yellow: important

 

[anon-y-mouse]

.

 

[8744]

For me:

Yellow: everything that's important
Green: disease
Blue: drug
Purple: pathogen
Pink: symptoms + drug adverse effects
Orange: reserved for special use

Tell me you're kidding.

 

[deleted77919]

For me:

Yellow: everything that's important
Green: disease
Blue: drug
Purple: pathogen
Pink: symptoms + drug adverse effects
Orange: reserved for special use

What about a pathogen that causes a disease? Do you mix the green and purple or just alternate letters with the hi-lighting?

 

[Pinkertinkle]

Black underline: may be important.
I have better things to spend my money on than highlighters.

 

[baylormed]

Black underline: may be important.
I have better things to spend my money on than highlighters.

+1

I tried a system for a while,

blue: clinical correlations
orange: important terms/definitions
yellow: subterms/subdefinitions
pink: special or interesting facts

I eventually got tired of reaching for the highlighters as I read. I now just annotate on the margins with a pen and take notes on paper.

 

[osli]

My system:

Highlighter that is nearby + something the prof says in class = highlighted in that color. Meaning pretty much every sentence in my notes is highlighted. Seems silly, and I often wonder why I do it, but I have found many cases where whole sections of notes were skipped in lecture and I really don't need to worry about studying those. A lot of stuff is included in our notes as FYI so I don't highlight that.

I hate buying highlighters though. It is a pet peeve. I avoid it at all costs. I go through them like mad, so every time we have a club fair or hospital day or residency fair or convention or whatever where people are giving out highlighters, I load up on them.

 

[Depakote]

blue- important
not blue- something that was probably important that I zoned-out on during lecture

 

[musiclink213]

I have a system that only makes sense to me, and I don't think I could ever try to explain it. But evetually, just about everything ends up highlighted, but that's the only way I read something. I think it's because i have to think about what I just read and determine what color it should be. And when I go back to reread, it looks so much prettier to have all the colors.

 

[CampUnity]

I just keep it to a minium. Using one color for major heading. And then the rest, just two colors, (organge and pink). If you high light too much, it'll crowed up the page and then you can't see anything after all.

 

[45408]

Yellow: important

Exactly. And I'll write in the margins of my notes to clarify a difficult point.

 

[sprinkibrio]

for biochem

orange: anything important/i didn't know before
green: vocab/enzymes
pink: diseases (which i also sticky)
blue: extremely important, used sparingly

i highlight to make things more interesting and stand out to me when i'm reading a second time. i never read just what was highlighted.

 

[humuhumu]

yellow: something important that I don't already know
black underline (along with yellow highlighting): really important

 

[hb2998]

2 highlighters, 3 colors:

Yellow and Pink
Yellow over Pink = Orange

Yellow: Professor emphasized in class
Pink: Whats I decide is important when I study
Orange: Where Prof and I agreed.

Last pass during before the test, I read only the orange.

 

[tacrum43]

Black underline: may be important.
I have better things to spend my money on than highlighters.

I prefer a blue pen because it contrasts with the black text better, but I agree. I don't like highlighters, it hurts my eyes to try and read the text after it's highlighted.

I use asterisks to denote something important. Larger ones depending on how important the fact it is. And I'll write a note if the professor mentioned "will be on exam", etc.

 

[mak530]

Haha, this thread is so funny! I thought I was the only highlighter, stickie, asterisk geek!

Yellow highlighter for notes during class
Pink highlighter for notes during study
Red felt tip pen for underlining REALLY important stuff that has already been highlighted (you'd think highlighting would be enough...)
Askerisks for important stuff - size of askerisks increase with increasing importance
Stickies - mainly for great diagrams, flow-charts etc.

The BEST feeling in the world, is at the end of that semester, you take out all the stickies from your text/note book! I know, you're all thinking 'nerd-burger', but still, it's gratifying!

 

[34140]

I tried SO hard to use the highlighter method....i was spending more time figuring out the color system rather than studying that i stopped.

🙁

 

[GuzzyRon]

I use only one color - bright yellow - and I keep the highlighting to a minimum. I get very easily distracted and anything more than one color for me becomes a distraction. I highlight in the same color anything that the prof said is important, I think is important or that I don't know and have to work on.

 

[LegacyDoctress]

i'm a first-year...

yellow- highlighting in textbooks, not in notes
green- important, things the professor has emphasized
blue- study questions or things that may be tested
pink- all clinical correlations (drug interactions, disease)
orange- links to other pathways

post-its- questions i need to ask the professor

 

[Doctor Bagel]

Black underline: may be important.
I have better things to spend my money on than highlighters.

👍 Sometimes I use a blue pen if that's what I've got handy, but I prefer black. 🙂

 

[Sean2tall]

Wow, haha. I never used highlighting - I guess people are just wired differently, but highlighting makes things much more difficult for me to read. All I can see is the highlighted or non-highlighted words. There is nothing about the color to me that would convey any meaning. I remember thinking it was funny to see how people had highlighted 90% of the notes.

 

[Blade28]

Wow. I'm impressed. Personally, I think I'd need flash cards to learn these highlighter color coding systems.

My thoughts exactly!

Way too many colors would confuse me.

 

[rfm1313]

Yellow: important

I enjoyed this thoroughly.

 

[DexterMorganSK]

Black pen when listening to lectures in class
Green pen when re-taking missing/additional notes on rewatch of the same lecture
Yellow highlighter: going through it for the first time after note-taking
Orange highlighter: for a 2nd/final run through before an exam
= so about 4x cycle per lec ppt

 

[LoGo]

After spending so much time devising and implementing color and underline schemes, how do you have time to actually study?

Here’s a +1 for just reading the notes and FA as they are written in black and white.

 

[The Knife & Gun Club]

This thread is 11 years old...did they even have highlighters back in those days? Or did you need to crush up berries and just smear it across the important bits?