A highlight is a marked passage within a document — selected during reading, retained as a separate object, and typically searchable, citeable, and re-surfaceable.
Why it matters
Highlights are the smallest unit of attention paid during reading. Saving 'the article' is cheap; saving 'the paragraph that mattered' is high-signal. Tools that elevate highlights to first-class objects (Readwise, Hypothesis, Pith) consistently outperform tools that don't, because retrieval against the high-signal passages is more useful than retrieval against the whole article.
How Pith relates
Pith's highlights are first-class: searchable, citeable in wiki pages, prioritised in briefings. Highlighted passages are preferred over raw bookmark text when the briefing pipeline picks excerpts.
See also
Last reviewed: 10 May 2026 · Licensed CC BY 4.0 · cite freely with attribution to Pith.