A simple set of margin marks

12 August 2026

My old habit was to underline freely and add comments whenever a sentence suggested another thought. The pages looked active, but they were difficult to use later. Strong claims, unfamiliar names, minor examples, and my own passing reactions all had the same visual weight.

I have reduced the system to three marks. A straight line identifies a passage worth reading again. A question mark means that I did not follow the claim or want to check it elsewhere. A small dot indicates a fact, name, or book that may be useful for another subject. Longer comments go in a notebook with the page number rather than into a narrow margin.

The main benefit is not speed. It is the small decision required by each mark. Before adding one, I have to decide whether I am preserving a passage, raising a question, or making a connection. If none of those descriptions fits, I usually leave the page alone.

At the end of a chapter, I glance back at the marked pages and write one sentence about the chapter's purpose. The marks act as reminders rather than as a substitute for that sentence. A month later, they make it possible to recover the useful parts without reading every paragraph again. Three signs have proved sufficient, and keeping them stable matters more than making them precise.