In the spirit of Autumn, I wanted to add some fall-inspired colors to my stationery cupboard. I bought a set of Zebra Mildliner Highlighters in a 5 Natural Color Set ($8). I’ve been inspired by folks on social media who have been posting about annotating books with stickie notes, page flags and highlighting. I am reading some more research books and thought trying out this epic “book defacing” project would start with highlighters and I will work up to the full effect shown in the photo below:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CxsUAoirgHO/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
The concept of this technique is to assign a purpose to each color you use. This was a lightbulb moment for me — a human who always just thinks “Ooo, I want to use the peach highlighter today.” No, silly woman, peach highlighter is for thought-provoking quotes, the green is for tips or short cuts, grey is for …. you get the idea. In fiction, annotators pick colors for specific characters so they will highlight the best Mr. Darcy quotes with green and Elizabeth with grey, etc.
The same can apply for adding page flags — assign a color to the flag based on what you are marking: sections are in one color, individual chapters are another and then important passages in another. Then you can add sticky notes with questions, ideas or thoughts that were inspired by the text.
So, now you know the impetus for purchasing the Mildliner set, now let’s look at the actual set I bought.
The pens feature a chisel tip on one end and a bullet-shaped tip on the other. Some of the colors are too light to really be functional as a writing tool but knowing that you can flip each marker around and get more use out of most of them is handy.
The colors included in the set are: Mild Beige, Mild Cool Gray, Mild Cream, Mild Dusty Pink, and Mild Olive. Since the individual pens are labelled in Japanese, I made up names when I was testing which you will see in a photo below.
The color I listed as Peach is the Mild Cream and is quite light, to the point of almost being unusable. All the others are acceptable in both highlighting chisel mode and writing bullet mode. It will come as no surprise to anyone that the Mild Olive and Mild Dusty Pink are my favorite colors. Most colors appear to be available as individual pens ($1.75 each) so if you would like to pick and choose, that’s an option too.
So, this was my first attempts to annotate a book (its the Bullet Journal book, in case you’re curious). The peach color (AKA Mild Cream) is a bit light on this off-white paper. I just randomly tested the colors as I was highlighting passages I liked. I will be a bit more precise about color options for specific purposes. A lot of people who annotate books are often annotating after doing a thorough, first read through so they have a clear idea of how to organize the annotating. I may need to apply this technique so I can put these Mildliners to good use.
DISCLAIMER: The items included in this review were provided free of charge by JetPens for the purpose of review. Please see the About page for more details.
