When you start highlighting without a clear strategy, you end up trying to do everything at once. You mark interesting quotes, important definitions, key arguments, surprising insights—and soon your highlights become an overwhelming collection that you'll never revisit. The text becomes cluttered, and you've spent time documenting things that were already obvious to you.
The solution isn't to highlight less—it's to choose your highlighting strategy before you begin reading. This single decision transforms highlighting from a reactive documentation task into an intentional practice aligned with your reading goals. When you know whether you're hunting for treasures or mapping the complete argument, you can move through the book with clarity and purpose.
Why not use both strategies at once? Because mixing them means you lose the benefits of both. The Collector strategy is liberating precisely because you're not trying to capture everything—only what truly touches you. The Composer strategy works because you're deliberately selective about what's necessary for the argument, not what's merely interesting. Try to do both, and you'll end up over-highlighting without the focus of either approach.
The Collector strategy is about gathering treasures along your reading journey. You highlight only what pops out—what touches you, surprises you, or catches your attention in a way you can't ignore. These are passages that speak for themselves, quotes you'd want to share, insights that shift your perspective.
Your perspective here is pure intuition. Don't ask yourself "Is this worth highlighting?" Ask instead: "Does this touch me? Does this surprise me?" You're looking for moments that would be treasures for your future self—things you'd regret not capturing. But you never highlight what's obvious to you or what bores you on a second read.
The challenge with this strategy is that some highlighted passages might be hard to understand without context. In these cases, you'll need to add an annotation—a quick note to your future self explaining what makes this passage significant or what context it requires. Most of your highlights, though, should be standalone passages that speak for themselves.
Another challenge: you're consciously giving up on capturing the book's complete storyline. You have to decide early that you don't need the full argument, or that the argument is too obvious to warrant the Composer approach. But when you make this decision, it's liberating. You can move through the book faster, highlight less, and end up with a more personal, more valuable collection.
Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is the perfect example. The book is already structured as scattered thoughts, most of which stand alone beautifully. There's no overarching argument to reconstruct—just treasures to collect. Similarly, Max Bennett's A Brief History of Intelligence offers fascinating standalone facts about early life forms and their evolutionary timelines—exactly the kind of knowledge you might want to preserve without needing the complete narrative structure (even though I find the book's whole storyline worth keeping as well).
Or consider Michael Ende's Momo, a children's book with a remarkable passage about a Roman emperor who ordered people to build a new world from the materials of the old one. The world was built on top of an amphitheater, and when someone asks where this new world is now, the storyteller reveals: "We are standing on it. The amphitheater is just upside down now." It's a beautiful moment of imagination—the kind of insight worth preserving even when you're reading casually to your children.
The outcome of the Collector strategy is a curated collection: quotes from great authors, facts you've always wanted to integrate into your knowledge, aha moments that touched you personally. You can refine these treasures further by creating flashcards for spaced repetition or using DeepRead's Idea Card feature to add images and annotations that make your highlights even more memorable.
The Composer strategy is about decomposing the book into its essential parts, then recomposing its argument. You highlight all passages needed to understand the book's complete storyline and core message. Your goal: someone reading only your highlights—your future self, another person, or an AI—should be able to grasp the author's full reasoning.
This requires a different mindset. You're hunting for the most content-dense sentences—the minimal text passages needed to understand the core argument and the sub-arguments that support it. Sometimes an author explains the same point from multiple angles across several sentences. Your job is to find the one sentence that captures the essence with the most economical use of words.
Chapter titles become crucial here. In understanding any book's structure, the titles provide essential context. DeepRead automatically adds chapter titles to your highlights—the only app that offers this feature—so you don't lose that structural information when reviewing your highlights later.
The challenge is avoiding over-highlighting while not missing essential parts. You need to distinguish between what's necessary for the argument and what's merely supporting detail. This takes practice. Often you'll need to reread passages to find the best sentence. Sometimes it's at the start or end of a section, but not always.
For simpler books with more obvious arguments, consider the keyword variation: highlight only the key terms of each chapter. If seeing those terms in order lets you reconstruct the full argument, you've succeeded. Test this approach on one chapter first—highlight the keywords, then ask yourself if you could rebuild the complete storyline from them alone. If not, you'll need to highlight full sentences instead. Extracting keywords can be a powerful way to deepen understanding without over-highlighting.
Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book demonstrates this perfectly. The authors spend several sentences explaining "analytical reading"—comparing it to inspectional reading, describing what it is and isn't. But the essence appears in one sentence: "Analytical reading is the best and most complete reading possible given unlimited time." That single line captures the concept. When you're composing, you hunt for sentences like this.
The outcome of the Composer strategy is a complete reconstruction of the book's argument. You can create a summary or, better yet, build a mind map that shows the entire book's structure on one page. With DeepRead, you can construct this manually or let the AI generate it—but only if you've highlighted as a Composer. If you highlighted as a Collector, the AI won't have enough information to reconstruct the argument, and the mind map will be incomplete.
Before starting your next book, do inspectional reading. Preview the table of contents, read the opening and closing sentences of chapters, and get a sense of the book's scope and complexity. Then ask yourself: Do I need the full argument, or just the treasures?
Choose your strategy and commit to it. If you choose Collector, trust your intuition and stay selective. If you choose Composer, decide whether full sentences or just keywords will serve your goal. For the Composer keyword approach, test it on one chapter first—highlight the key terms, then see if you can reconstruct the argument. If you can't, shift to highlighting full sentences.
This decision—made before you read the first page—determines whether you'll spend your time efficiently or end up with a cluttered collection of highlights you'll never use. Most books don't deserve the Composer treatment. Save that strategy for books where understanding the complete argument genuinely matters. For everything else, collect the treasures and move on.
The right highlighting strategy isn't about documenting everything—it's about creating exactly the outcome you need. Know your goal, choose your approach, and let every highlight serve that purpose.
