peterwhitesell

> I believe this behavior has a lot to do with the mechanical act of clicking, the sound and feedback that for some reason feels good and ends up becoming a compulsion.

I'm a compulsive highlighter for most of the reasons people have described. I don't hear any sound when I click though, because I use a touchpad with no mouse buttons or clicking (tap to click, tap-tap-drag to highlight, two finger tap to right click, two finger scrolling).

Since I started reading a lot on a touch screen phone I've been frustrated by the lack of easy highlighting, and I compulsively scroll to track my place instead.

Even when typography isn't bad I've always had a hard time tracking back to the next line both with text on paper and on screens. My most common use is to highlight one line at a time, although I sometimes highlight to save my place (arbitrary length selection) and sometimes to emphasize a concept out of a larger mess of text (context based selection length).

Usually I highlight from near the middle of one line to near the middle of the next line. If near the end of reading line N I highlight from the middle of line N+1 to the middle of line N+2, I can use the one highlight three times to help me track back: first I track back to the first line above the highlight (N+1), second I track back to the highlighted line (N+2), third I track back to the first line under the highlight (N+3).

Similarly highlighting multiple lines at a time it's easy to subconsciously remember which line of the selection to read next (first, second, third, ...) without having to visually track back, as long as the selection isn't very long (much like how it's harder to keep track of where you are in a longer paragraph).

After a few days of use, I customized my readability (actually I use clearly now. http://evernote.com/clearly/) style to make highlighted text easier to read. After I moved to a theme with dark background and light text, the contrast between selection text and selection background was annoyingly low.

Those sites bug me too, as a heavy user of highlighting. It also causes me problems reading editable text, for instance in a text editor. Sometimes I'll accidentally click and drag a selection to a different part of the text without noticing. I usually notice, but if I don't it can cause problems later, especially with text that is code, where it can cause mysterious bugs to show up.

I've been doing this for about a year and a half now. I noticed my reading speed increased drastically along with this habit. I haven't done any actual measurements, but the speed difference is especially noticeable when I read from paper, or images of text.

I mostly use a trackpad. I interact with what I'm reading by two finger scrolling and tap-tap-drag highlighting.