A better kind of bookmark

About

For years, I earned a living by writing — first as an editor, then as a writer in banking and tech.

With each role and salary increase, my professional vocabulary grew more constrained, until the point where I was earning six figures designing content systems for apps, but was obliged to write to a 6th-grade level to remain accessible to an international, non-native English-speaking audience.

When I lost my job in tech, I disappeared into literature. Because why not? On average it's far less depressing than the current state of affairs. It quickly became apparent just how far I had drifted from the vibrant literary mind of my youth. The tedium of adult labour had blunted my creativity and vernacular.

As I read, I found myself repeatedly looking up words I didn't know. But the act of looking up new words on my phone disrupted my reading process. I would set my phone down half an hour later, having browsed new job postings, scrolled mindlessly, and altogether abandoned the literary world, only to realise I had forgotten to look up that word. And where was I in my book?

My phone, I decided, had no place in my reading experience.

As something of a purist, I've always favoured physical books over eReaders. The smell of aging ink on paper, decaying glue. The satisfying act of turning a page.

If you're reading this, maybe you do, too.

So I started using a scrap piece of paper as a bookmark. Each time I encountered an unfamiliar word, I would write it down on the paper and continue reading. I could always understand the sentence well enough without looking the word up right away — I could make sense of the word contextually. And writing it down demanded only the briefest interruption to my reading. Later, at the end of my reading session, I would look up the word and record its meaning.

The act of writing it down helped me commit it to memory. I soon ended up with lots of little scraps, filled with words and their meanings.

Pretty cool, I thought. I should put these together into some sort of book.

And so, the idea of Word‑Mark was born. From there, I set about designing the perfect vocabulary bookmark. And this is what I came up with.