To Highlight or Not To Highlight? That Is the Question.

On the etiquette of highlighting on Medium, and highlight-happy bots

Starting out on Medium, I found the green highlighter button! I figured out how to use this before I figured out how to use all those little formatting symbols.

I like highlighting. I would never highlight “good books” because those are sacred. Why ruin a perfectly good edition of the House of Mirth, Rebecca, or Douglas Adam’s The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul? That’s bordering on sacrilege.

College textbooks, self-help books, or how-to books? Now those are fair game. Any online work is fair game, too. (Relax. It’s not like the marks you make online are permanent!)

Highlighting helps me focus my attention and quickly sort out the key points.

I don’t usually go back and read them, later. But the highlighting motion keeps me engaged in the text in a way I enjoy.

This active engagement with the text also helps me remember what I’ve learned, later.

It was eye-opening the first time someone highlighted one of my pieces. I go back to a crisp page and there are a few green marks on it now. Medium proudly announces: XYZ-person just highlighted your text!

I then see in read-for-read groups the phrase “I read, clapped, commented, and highlighted!” Whoops! I was just reading and clapping. Overachievers.

This “and highlighted” phrase gave me the idea that highlights have positive connotations on Medium. That I should be doing that, too. That my highlights need to be significant and meaningful.

Then I thought: Dang, now I feel exposed. I didn’t know the actual writer was seeing all my green highlighting marks. Those are supposed to be private.

Highlighting suddenly became a responsibility. A weight to bear.

I started suddenly second-guessing all my highlighting marks. If I don’t highlight, will the writer think I didn’t read their article, and I’m just fake clapping. Will they think that I found nothing useful?

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