Did any of you study the WT lesson throughly without ANY underlining?

by asilentone 27 Replies latest jw experiences

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  AK - Jeff

  I followed the lemmings down to the highlighter aisle at A&P - but often did not use them.

  3rd grade level ideology and weekly repeated rhetoric just did not require much prep

  Jeff
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  undercover

  Remember how the conductor would call on one person and then go ahead pick the next one or two people from the hands raised? It went something like, "Brother Smith please, and then Brother Jones and Sister Jackson".

  I knew a newly indoctrinated brother who got a big kick out of how the second and third people would almost always say, "same thought" especially when the original answer was quoted almost verbatim from the magazine. I didn't get it at the time, but I think he was amazed at how no one had an original thought of their own but were parroting what they read.

  So one WT study, he waited until after the question was answered and then raised his hand. The conductor called on him thinking that he was going to get an original additional thought but all the brother said was "same thought". He told me later, "I always wanted to do that...".
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  blondie

  5.3. Highlight the Text in the Margin

  There are some other tricks for active reading. One, of course, is to highlight important or interesting passages. There are several ways to do this. The worst is to use a yellow highlighting marker (or hot pink, or whatever color you like). The main problem with this is that you will tend to find almost every sentence to be important or interesting. As a consequence, every page will become yellow (or hot pink, or whatever). Not only does this defeat the purpose of highlighting—because if everything has been highlighted, then really nothing has been!—but the pages of your text will become damp, curl up, and be generally messy.

  This technique can have other problems, too:

  

  A slightly less messy, but equally useless, technique is to use a pen or pencil to underline important or interesting passages. I guarantee that you will wind up underlining every sentence on every page, and you will have gained nothing.

  The technique that I suggest is also susceptible to this problem, but has a built-in way to overcome it, so that you can re-read the text, highlighting different passages each time. The trick is to highlight a passage by drawing a vertical line in the margin. I like to use the right margin and to make my line a right square bracket: ] . If you want to make it clear [exactly where the highlighted passage begins or ends,] you can use small square brackets in the text, as I did in this sentence, along with the vertical line in the margin. This way, even if you've slipped into the error of highlighting (i.e., vertical-lining) every sentence on every page, at least you haven't ruined the page. Moreover, when you re-read the text (note that I said 'when', not 'if' :-), you can then use a different highlighting technique (e.g., underlining) to highlight more important passages. Sometimes, I use double brackets in the margin for this second round of highlighting: ] ] and underlining for a third round. (If you must, you could use yellow highlighter for a fourth round.)
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  blondie

  I couldn't afford highlighters when I was growing up or even as an adult. I just used a pencil and circled one or 2 words. That's what I still do to do the WT reviews.
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  iMARX

  This is such a funny thread. I remember amongst all the horrific things that happen in the WTS that the little things seem so funny now. I hated how everyone was judged on whether they had done their watchtower or not.

  When my mum hadn't studied her watchtower, but I had (underlined random words) she used to make me swap so it looked like she had done her study!
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  ssn587

  I use to highlight bullet type phrases or words, do in depth research on some items and hope to answer, now in latter years when asked why I don't answer anymore I simply tell them I ain't a parrot, you don't want a real answer and taking only a few seconds to parrot an answer makes attending this things boringsome. I ususally read notes i made on research into archaeology, paleonotology etal. I don't pay any attention to what is going on don't take out Wt open it, just do my note reading, drives the spouse nuts and of course others eyes turn jaundiced when looking at you and seeing what you are doing. I have been asked a number of times by the mic carriers and group dude why I ain't participating? So I tell them its because i already went to kindergarten and have no wish to return thank you. That always shuts them up and so now they just leave me alone and i continue to ignore them.
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  xmkx

  Highlighting answers was how I avoided actually reading the articles. The answers were obvious and I was required to highlight them in order to prove that I was really reading the material. So I just read the questions and scanned the corresponding paragraphs for the answers. I didn't even bother looking up the quoted scriptures most of the time because I knew what ever scripture put there "supported" what the article was saying and even if it didn't really support what the article was saying (anyone remember quoted scriptures that seemed to have absolutely NOTHING to do with the paragraph?) it's not like I could have said anything about it anyways. If I ad-libbed it was all from memory or personal experience. I must say I had a lot less interest in the Bible as a JW than I do now. After all, who needs the Bible when you have the WBTS telling you what it says and doing all your scriptural quotes for you?
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  Jazzbo

  I never underlined, I did write the occasional note in the margin or on a separate piece of paper. I remember two things about underlining that make me laugh. I was the Watchtower Study conductor and generally considered to be quite good at it. Some dinosaur of a visiting speaker noticed during the closing prayer that my magazine wasn't underlined and tried to give me some grief about it after the meeting. I showed him my eight pages of notes and it still wasn't good enough so I told him he was a complete moron as well as being a lousy speaker he stomped off in a huff. The other was a CO blowing an hour and a half Elder's meeting teaching us how to to underline our lessons, what a condescending jackass he was. Even the worshipful Elders were hacked off about that.