How I Tab My Books and Review Preparation… cause that’s a new thing I do now

Storytime: The first book I’d ever tabbed was Furthermore. I stuck with one color pink and tabbed all of the moments that made me happy.

As you can see, I had no idea what I was doing.

However, it’s a new year and I have a few books that I haven’t reviewed that I’d like to. I haven’t gotten to writing down my thoughts yet because not only did I read these before I started blogging but… a lot of these made me emotional and I need to refresh my memory so I can do these reviews justice. 

Soooooooooooooo… the colors:

• Yellow: Quotable quotes/Badass/Relatable moments… and things I need to remember for a review | I remember in school when the teacher used to tell us to highlight important things and I could not function if my highlighter was any color other than yellow. It just felt more sophisticated. 

My thought process was a mess. 

But also badass/relatable moments tend to be pretty quotable too (take a look at all of SJM books) so this can easily correlate to the *green tab.

Look, yellow is a very versatile color.

• Blue: Sadness | For obvious reasons, though for 12th grade I did a half ass poem on why blue shouldn’t only be correlated to the emotions of sadness…
• Purple: Romance for my dead heart | Now, I don’t know why I didn’t use pink… but when I’m tabbing pages on my ereader, they’re mostly romantic scenes… Says a lot about me.
• Orange: WTF moments/Angry | <– that’s actually how I have it written in my notebook. But um… A lot of those tabbing palette things don’t really have red, so orange will have to do. I don’t know why I’d mark those parts like I’d reread them after my initial first read, but that’s a decision I decided to make.

But now that I think about it, I need those parts to rant in my reviews soooooooooooooo

• *Green: I Deserve Happiness | parts that make me happy, like family/friend moments, etc, but um… also see above and such.*

Now, I know tabbing is usually used to… help with finding important things and maybe help with my reviews… which is why I sturggle with mines but I love physically writing things down? So that’s what my notebook is for. Because I won’t write in my books.

No shade to anyone who does. Just a personal preference.

And I’ve noticed that my notes for my reviews are AMAZING and by amazing I mean long. Take my recent review of When the Sky Fell on Splendor … Five freaking pages.

Now, I’m not the best to ask about writing reviews, let alone preparation. I tend to infodump and spill my brain onto the page while oftentimes forgetting to write down things that are actually important.

But sometimes, I can find some gem of substances in my extensive exposition. Again, not foolproof, but it works for me, you know?

Soooooooo moral of the story is do you. There’s no inherent way to do what works for you.

As for actually writing reviews…I’ll save that for another time.

Tell me your tabbing techniques? Any tips? Am I the only one who finds writing reviews difficult? Let me know in the comments below!