Highlighting & Notes - Best Practices

Daniel

I'm using highlighting for marking up my ESV bible, but I would like to get off on the right foot before going too far... so I'm wondering if there are best practices or suggestions people have for using highlights, palettes, and note linking.

I have the standard observation highlights such as Who, What, Where, Connectives, Repeated ideas, etc.  that I would use to mark up books, and I'm also planning on having highlights for pre-defined biblical themes I would like to follow throughout, such as "seeking God".

Using this approach, once I have the highlights sorted out for the various observations, would the best approach be to create a palette for each book that contain the same highlights?  i.e. Romans Highlights, Galatians Highlights, etc set to save in note books matching the name of the highlight palette.   The advantage I see to this is it organizes all the highlights into smaller groups (per book).  The disadvantage being that I have to create many copies of the same highlight (i.e., a Who observation for each book/palette), and if I want to modify a highlight then I need to modify each instance of that highlight in all palettes.   The example I've seen in the 10 day training was to create a palette for a single chapter, Matthew 4, but boy would that add up to a lot of palette's. 

For the common biblical themes I would like to trace with different kinds of highlights, would it be best to create a palette for the all themes and use the same palette for all themes in all books, or would it be best to create a palette per theme linked to a single note file for each theme?

The options are varied and once I get invested into a particular approach I can see it could be confusing and a lot of work to make changes.   I don't really want an "I wish I had done it another way" type of scenario.

Perhaps there is already a resource or post dedicated to this (searching for the words 'highlighting' and 'notes' brings up a lot of unrelated posts), and if so please forgive the long-winded question and direct me to it...but if not, what would you consider to be a best practice for this?   What methods do you use?

Thanks

Keep Smiling 4 Jesus :)

Daniel said:

such as "seeking God".

Welcome [:D]

One idea could be visual filter highlighting of a preaching theme

Clause Search for "goal:God" came from a Semantic Role section in Factbook for God.

Opening up Bible verse from Clause Search result found Preaching Themes.  Search results for Preaching Theme can be saved as a Visual Filter for use in desired set of resources: e.g. All Bibles.

Note: all visual filters are turned off in the Lexham English Bible so search results show preaching theme.  NLT has visual filter for Preaching Theme enabled.

Another idea is a note file per theme.  The visual filter menu allows note file(s) to be chosen for display (or not).

Keep Smiling [:)]

JT (alabama24)

Daniel said:

but boy would that add up to a lot of palette's. 

I know some users who do that... and I think it is plain nuts! [:P]

You really have two separate (but potentially related) lines of questioning. The first is about highlighting schemes (i.e. "precepts"). I don't use any highlighting scheme and have nothing to offer. 

The second line of questioning is about where to store your notes, and what settings to use. That I have some thoughts on. 

• The mobile apps do better with smaller note documents. Despite this, the default settings facilitate LARGE note documents. Specifically I refer to the setting that sends notes (highlights) to note documents named after the highlighting pallet (i.e. "solid color"). 
• Personally, I associate the highlights with the resource they are found within. This behavior is called "resource specific." If you use this setting exclusively to create the highlights and have highlighted in the ESV, or "the purpose driven life," you will find ALL of your highlights for each of those books within a note document named for the RESOURCE. 
• On the desktop, this behavior is controlled at the pallet level. On mobile, it is controlled app wide. 

The only thing else I should perhaps add... If you use highlighting in your bible in a DIFFERENT way than you do in other resources, it might be best to create special pallets for bible highlighting with their own behavior... just realize that those notes will be stored differently and that you shouldn't use those pallets in other resources (or at least understand and know what you are doing at the time).