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How to make a study guide from your Google Docs highlights

You highlighted the chapter. The exam is Friday. The fastest study guide is the one made of the passages you already marked, and it takes ten minutes if the highlights were done with a little structure.

Highlight with the exam in mind

A study guide is three lists: things to know, things to be able to do, and things you keep getting wrong. Give each a color while you read:

• Yellow: definitions and facts. Terms, dates, formulas, names. The "what."
• Green: processes and reasoning. How a proof goes, why a policy failed, the steps of a method. The "how" and "why."
• Pink: confusions. Anything you had to reread. This color is the most valuable one, and the one most students skip.

Keep the highlighted passages short. A definition is one sentence; a process is two or three. If a whole paragraph is yellow you have marked the location, not the content, and you will have to reread it.

Method 1: Collect the highlights by hand

1. Create a new doc called "Course study guide" with three headings: Know, Do, Confusions.
2. Scroll through the reading and copy each highlighted passage under the matching heading. Paste with Cmd+Shift+V (Ctrl+Shift+V) so the highlight color is dropped.
3. Under Confusions, rewrite each passage in your own words. If you cannot, that is a question for office hours, which is the point.

Time: about a minute per highlight, so a 40-highlight chapter is most of an hour. Doable once. Not doable for six chapters the night before.

Method 2: Harvest them in one click

With Highlight Harvest installed, open the reading, then Extensions → Highlight Harvest → Open sidebar, and:

1. Name the three colors Know, Do, and Confusions (once; the names stick).
2. Click Harvest highlights. Every highlighted passage appears in the sidebar grouped under those names, in reading order.
3. Click Copy and paste into your study-guide doc, or Insert at end of doc to add a "Highlights" section with a heading per color at the bottom of the reading.

Repeat for each chapter and paste them in order. Six chapters take about as long as reading this page.

Turn the list into a guide

• Know → flashcards. Each yellow line becomes a front (the term) and back (the definition). Split the sentence at "is" or "means."
• Do → worked examples. For each green process, write the steps as a numbered list from memory, then check against the passage.
• Confusions → questions. Rewrite each pink passage as a question. Answer it in writing. If the answer is not in your notes, ask someone before the exam, not during it.

Delete passages from the guide as you master them. A study guide that gets shorter each day is working; one that stays the same length is being reread, not studied.

For group study

Share one reading doc and give each person a color. Harvest at the end and you have everyone's picks grouped by person, which is a better discussion starter than "what did everyone think." With named colors the groups are labeled by name automatically.

Mistakes to avoid

• Highlighting on the first read. Read a section, then go back and mark. First-read highlights are guesses about what will matter.
• Skipping pink. Marking only what you understood produces a guide to the material you did not need help with.
• A guide longer than the reading. If it is, the highlights were too long. Cut each passage to the sentence that carries it.