Highlighting promotes selectivity and encourages to focus on the core meanings of the text. Highlighting follows making judgments about what is important, so it is about getting a general overview of the main ideas. A good rule is to highlight one sentence per paragraph, as paragraphs usually focus on one key points. It is the main point that you need to identify first in the paragraph. Highlighting is the first step for identifying key ideas. It is a rather passive process and you usually do not remember the ideas that you identified. Rather than returning to the highlighted text every time you draw upon ideas, it is useful to develop a form of short note taking. Some students prefer adding short notes into the margins in places where they could find relevant information. Other students take short notes using symbols, shorthand and abbreviations in the same way as was described in the section Listening. Where longer words are concerned, shorthand entailing leaving out vowels or cutting off the end of words are used, e.g. adv. for advantage. Developing your own shorthand or abbreviations makes sense, but there are lists of English shorthand and abbreviations as mentioned in the Listening Section.