How to annotate a book

In the margin, write what the text says or what you think of it, in a few words of your own. A mark shows where something is. A note says what it is. Most notes are one of four kinds.

• The point, in your words. Five or six words that say what the paragraph says.
• A question. What you would ask the author if you could.
• A link. The number of another page that says the same thing, or the opposite.
• An example of your own. One thing from your own life that fits the point.

Use your own words, and do not copy the author’s. A note in your own words takes more thought than a highlight, so you are more likely to remember it (the Open University).

Take notes from a book in two steps. While you read, mark the page and write a few words beside the text. After each chapter, write one page from memory. Here is how to write that page.

1. Close the book and turn it face down.
2. Write the question the chapter was trying to answer. Then write its answer.
3. List the main points in order.
4. Write down what you still doubt or did not understand.
5. Open the book. Check your page against your marks, and fix what you got wrong.

Do not skip the last step, because a summary helps only when it is correct. And keep to one page. One page makes you choose what mattered. Guides for students describe the same habit: put the text away, write the main points from memory, then go back for what you missed (the Open University).

To remember what you read, close the book and try to say what was in it. Your marks cannot do this for you. You use them afterward, to check what you left out. Do it once when you finish reading for the day, and again a day or two later.

Researchers have tested this with reading. In two experiments, college students read a text, put it away, said aloud all they could remember, and then read it again. They remembered more of texts full of facts than students who read the text twice or took notes (McDaniel, Howard and Einstein, 2009).

Testing your memory like this is called active recall. A large review of ways to study gave it a high rating (Dunlosky and colleagues, 2013).

Highlighting helps a little, and less than most people think. A large review of ways to study gave highlighting and underlining a low rating. It found that in most cases highlighting does little to help (Dunlosky and colleagues, 2013).

A later review put together 36 articles on highlighting. Students who highlighted remembered the text better, but they did not understand it better (Ponce, Mayer and Méndez, 2022).

So keep the underline, and keep it to one sentence in a paragraph. Guides for students say the same: mark only a little, because too much highlighting does not help (the Open University). Then do one more thing with the page. Write a note beside it, or close the book and test yourself.

Every finding on this page links to one of the sources below. We read each one for this page, the whole text or its summary. The five marks, and how often to use each, are our own simple rules.

1. The Open University, Critical reading techniques (read October 9, 2026). Active reading.
2. McDaniel, M. A., Howard, D. C. and Einstein, G. O. (2009). The read-recite-review study strategy: effective and portable. Psychological Science, 20(4), 516-522.
3. Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J. and Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4 to 58.
4. Ponce, H. R., Mayer, R. E. and Méndez, E. E. (2022). Effects of learner-generated highlighting and instructor-provided highlighting on learning from text: a meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 34(2), 989-1024.