Fifteen Minutes: To Underline or Not to Underline

RESIST:

Back in high school, you were the note-taking shit. You wrote marginalia better than Dryden or Wolfe. When you cracked Of Mice and Men, your great English teacher knew you were college material. In those days, your scribbles were pure gold and your friends cheated off your underlines.

But now you've come up in the world and book money is beer money. And you're sharing library books with the big kids. Face another harsh reality: Everybody at this school, being so smart and all, can, believe it or not, recognize your handwriting. Which means that when they check out that book on Mating Habits of the Lower Primates, they read every insipid thing you scrawled, and they still snicker every time they pass by in the yard. You've become something of a school-wide joke; you're the fool who scribbled "symbolism," "why?" and "interesting" on every page of To Kill a Mockingbird. Take a tip, my friend: Mend your ways. Lose the hi-liter. The rest of us are laughing at you.

DO IT:

To go with the words of my senile yet seemingly credible eighth grade math teacher Mrs. Kelly, I'd have to agree that "the more senses you bring into the learning process, the more fruitful will be the learning." Marking up textbooks, thus, is not a malicious act of destruction. Rather, marginalia are a personal art form wherein highlighting, underlining and even doodling trigger specific parts of your brain. The fact remains that we don't just remember ideas; we remember colors, tastes and sounds. Bet you still remember those magenta koolats you wore to the 6th grade dance. For shit's sake, get that neat smelling marker away from your nasal cavity and throw some ink on the page.