Tasteful Use of a Highlighter Pen

Yesterday morning, while walking around the city, I saw something that surprised and delighted me: a handwritten page out of a student's notebook, demonstrating use of highlighter pens for emphasis in a way that is different and better than what I'm used to see. I am thus enriched with the knowledge of new tricks that I might apply in my own penmanship, and encouraged by evidence that at least some of the people around me have good taste. So, here is what I learned:

Choice of Color

Pink, obviously. But not your archetypical bright and fluorescent rhodamine pink. The author of that page used a more subdued pink, one that is suitable for attracting attention to the highlighted text, rather than having a color so loud and over-the-top that it overshadows the text rather than serving to emphasize it.

What I've Learned

1. If you wish to emphasize text, the archetypical fluorescent highlighter pen dyes (pyrene yellow, rhodamine pink, and that green mixture of pyrene and triphenylmethane) aren't fit for purpose.

2. While researching the names of the particular dyes for this post, I also learned that they are literally fluorescent. For some reason I always assumed that people calling highlighter pens "fluorecent" meant that figuratively.

2.a. (who needs literally-fluorescent highlighter pens? The typical student, as far as I know, does not take her study notes in a dark room with a "black light" lamp as her only source of illumination.)

3. Highlighter pens in softer colors are available for purchase, if you know where to look.

What to Highlight

In the page I found, the parts that were highlighted were section titles and paragraph numbers; structure rather than semantic content. This makes sense when you think of the properties of highlighting in particular, as opposed to other methods of emphasizing handwritten text. A swipe of the pen creates a thick, solid block of color, clearly visible even from a distance that makes reading the actual text impractical. To paraphrase Wikipedia:

Within a larger body of text, an underlined piece does not stand out much; instead, it signifies a context difference only while the text is being read. By contrast, a single highlighted word attracts the human gaze and is therefore recommended for keywords the reader might be looking for.

=> Original quote, refers to italics and boldface respectively | Found in the context of a Wikipedia article titled "Emphasis (typography)". Note the absence of a corresponding entry for "Emphasis (chirography)".

What I've Learned

4. There is no word in the English language that refers precisely to the concept of [everything that is commonly entailed by "typography", but in the context of handwritten texts rather than print]. Lack of suitable vocabulary makes writing posts like this one pretty awkward.

5. There are multiple valid goals that can be achieved with the help of textual emphasis. In my days as a student I've used emphasis as an aid to understanding (using "not quite typography" to draw the reader's attention to slight differences in meaning); Now I see more clearly the value of emphasis as an aid to navigation.

6. Different methods of emphasis are more or less suited to different purposes. Highlighter pens (even those with softer, more translucent colors) can be overbearing when used for in-line, semantic emphasis. But when used for structural, aid-to-navigation emphasis, they can truly shine.