The Prolific Underliners: On the Necessity of the Indiscriminate Stroke

In Defense of Marking Everything

So much of modern counsel on the art of reading revolves around discipline. We are told to be surgical with our pens, to underline only the most profound passages, to make our margins a hallowed ground for only the most trenchant of thoughts. We treat the book’s page as a scarce canvas, fearing that a single errant mark will debase its purity. This prevailing wisdom suggests that value is found in exclusion, in a kind of curatorial restraint. I want to argue the opposite. There is a singular, counterintuitive virtue in the wild, the prolific, the indiscriminate underlining.

Consider the commonplace book of a previous age, or the lecture notes of a medieval scholar. They were not exercises in minimalism; they were feasts of accretion. Words, phrases, entire paragraphs were copied out, not because every line was gold, but because the act of capture itself trained the attention and built a landscape of thought. The modern ideal of the ‘perfect line’ imposes a false economy. It assumes we know, in the first encounter, what will resonate in the tenth, or what trivial-seeming phrase will unlock a memory years hence. We do not.

The prolific underliner engages in a different craft: the craft of immediate, unfiltered response. That line about the colour of the sky might seem merely pretty today, but when you return to the book after a season of grief, its gentle hue may be the only thing that speaks. Had you been judicious, you would have passed it by. The faint pencil stroke is not a declaration of eternal truth; it is a flag planted in the subjective soil of a particular reading, on a particular afternoon. It marks where your mind, for reasons clear or opaque, stumbled or soared. The pattern of these marks—clustered in some chapters, sparse in others—creates a unique map not of the book’s importance, but of your own reading’s psychology.

This practice dismantles the tyranny of the ‘key takeaway.’ It allows for a reading that is sensual and meandering, one that values texture over thesis. A page heavy with underlinings and asterisks is a page that was truly lived with, argued with, and loved imperfectly. It becomes an artifact of a dialogue, not a monument to a summary. The future you, revisiting, does not find a curated exhibit of your past intellect; you find a record of your past attention in all its glorious, human messiness. You see not what you thought was important, but what you actually noticed.

So, let your pencil run freely. Underline the dubious metaphor, the factual aside, the sentiment that seems too sweet. Fill the margins with question marks and naïve ‘yes!’ exclamations. In this apparent indiscretion lies a deeper discipline: the discipline to honour your own, unedited cognitive journey through a text. The value is not in the signal discovered amongst the noise, but in the honest charting of the noise itself. For in that noise is the sound of a mind truly at work, reading not for later retrieval, but for present, uncalculated immersion.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: