Death by Highlighter :: Graduate College Admissions Essays

Death by Highlighter I woke up Tuesday morning with a strange sense that I was not alone in bed. Something was jabbing me in the left hip. I opened one eye tentatively. It was 8:47 a.m., and I did not want to be awake. I investigated the source of the jabbing feeling to discover, to my horror, a florescent yellow, uncapped highlighter that I had let slip after falling asleep while reading a report on science and engineering at Duke. I shuddered, moved the higlighter to a more innocuous location on the floor, and went back to sleep. The perils of highlighters, however, extend well beyond my now-fluorescent-yellow sheets, nightgown and left hip. Having highlighted my way through three years of college, four years of high school and a few years of junior high, I have reached the shocking conclusion that highlighters have undermined my education. Before the days of transparent yellow markers, readers took notes on reading, or wrote in ball-point pen in the margins, forcing themselves to transmit information from words on a page to coherent thought to at least somewhat coherent squiggles on the page. The highlighter offers a seductive shortcut--the reader can bypass the "coherent thought to squiggle" step of the process and simply smear interesting passages with fluorescent ink, no analysis required. Particularly impressive phrases may merit an emphatic mark in the margin, and, on rare occasions, the holder of the fluorescent wand may even add a note in blue or black ink. Regardless, however, the marker-wielding reader generally smears large tracts of text with ink, never bothering to summarize or paraphrase information. I know the pathological symptoms of highlighter-addiction because I am a victim. I shouldn't have turned out this way--I had a strictly traditional fifth-grade history teacher who required us to take notes on our reading in outline form. But something happened in high school, I think in European History, when I realized I could never write down every iota of information in our menacingly dense text book--so I grabbed hold of a highlighter and started marking interesting facts in bright yellow. I meant to make notes in the margins, but there wasn't time . . . and so I launched myself down the highlighter path to mental oblivion. Highlighters should shoulder at least as much of the blame as MTV for Generation X's short attention span and anti-intellectual leanings. Death by Highlighter :: Graduate College Admissions Essays Death by Highlighter I woke up Tuesday morning with a strange sense that I was not alone in bed. Something was jabbing me in the left hip. I opened one eye tentatively. It was 8:47 a.m., and I did not want to be awake. I investigated the source of the jabbing feeling to discover, to my horror, a florescent yellow, uncapped highlighter that I had let slip after falling asleep while reading a report on science and engineering at Duke. I shuddered, moved the higlighter to a more innocuous location on the floor, and went back to sleep. The perils of highlighters, however, extend well beyond my now-fluorescent-yellow sheets, nightgown and left hip. Having highlighted my way through three years of college, four years of high school and a few years of junior high, I have reached the shocking conclusion that highlighters have undermined my education. Before the days of transparent yellow markers, readers took notes on reading, or wrote in ball-point pen in the margins, forcing themselves to transmit information from words on a page to coherent thought to at least somewhat coherent squiggles on the page. The highlighter offers a seductive shortcut--the reader can bypass the "coherent thought to squiggle" step of the process and simply smear interesting passages with fluorescent ink, no analysis required. Particularly impressive phrases may merit an emphatic mark in the margin, and, on rare occasions, the holder of the fluorescent wand may even add a note in blue or black ink. Regardless, however, the marker-wielding reader generally smears large tracts of text with ink, never bothering to summarize or paraphrase information. I know the pathological symptoms of highlighter-addiction because I am a victim. I shouldn't have turned out this way--I had a strictly traditional fifth-grade history teacher who required us to take notes on our reading in outline form. But something happened in high school, I think in European History, when I realized I could never write down every iota of information in our menacingly dense text book--so I grabbed hold of a highlighter and started marking interesting facts in bright yellow. I meant to make notes in the margins, but there wasn't time . . . and so I launched myself down the highlighter path to mental oblivion. Highlighters should shoulder at least as much of the blame as MTV for Generation X's short attention span and anti-intellectual leanings.