Semantic Annotation: When to Use Each Category
BetterReads lets you mark a passage and give it a semantic label—not just a highlight, but a note about what kind of thing you are saving. The categories look simple; the skill is knowing which label fits this sentence.
If you want the research-backed case for why structured notes help memory, start with Structured Annotation for Deep Reading. This post is the field guide: when to use Character, Scene, Theme, Idea, and Quote, and how to tell them apart.
Character
Use it when the span is about who someone is, what they do, what they feel, or how we are meant to see them—including the narrator.
What you are capturing: identity in motion: action, voice, body, desire, weakness, a turn in how we read them.
Example
Text: “Elizabeth Bennet, feeling a sudden surge of indignation, slammed the door shut.”
Label: Character — you are saving a beat of temper and agency, not a general truth about the world.
Text: “Mr. Darcy stood stiffly in the doorway, his face unreadable.”
Label: Character — physical stance and social mask; it could support a later theme, but the primary payload is this person, this moment.
If the same passage is really about a society-wide claim (“all marriages are economic transactions”), lean Theme or Idea; if it is this person’s humiliation or pride, stay with Character.
Scene
Use it when you need to remember what happened in the story: a beat of plot, a turn in a relationship, a place where the room or the action changes.
What you are capturing: narrative fact and situation—then X occurred, they met here, the argument pivoted.
Example
Text: “The officer brushed past him as if he were a piece of furniture; he did not move, but he stored the insult like a coiled wire.”
Label: Scene — a public encounter with consequences, even if it also implies character psychology. The anchor is: I want to find this moment again in the chain of events.
Theme
Use it when the passage states or dramatizes a pattern the book keeps worrying at: freedom, class, memory, debt, love and power, the cost of honesty, and the like.
What you are capturing: meaning that repeats or ramifies—something you could plausibly track across chapters with more than one example.
Example
Text: “He would not be free; he would prove he was free, even if freedom meant ruin.”
Label: Theme — the condition the novel keeps testing (rationality vs. spite, will vs. compulsion), not a one-off witticism.
Theme vs. Idea (below): Theme is organizing; Idea is local. If you could name a term paper section after it, it is often a theme tag. If it is a single sharp thought you might quote in a letter, it may be an Idea instead.
Idea
Use it when the passage condenses a discrete claim, image, or argument—a conceptual node you might reuse in conversation—even if the whole book is not “about” only that.
What you are capturing: something you could paraphrase as a sentence of theory: a definition, a twist on common sense, a thesis the paragraph is proving.
Example
Text: “Two plus two is five, sometimes, when a man is alive and fighting for a breath of air.”
Label: Idea — a compressed proposition about justice and calculation; it connects to theme, but you are flagging the insight in the box, not the book’s full moral architecture.
Idea vs. Theme: same sentence might warrant Idea if you care about this formulation; Theme if you are building a running list of the novel’s big questions. Both can coexist on different passes—pick the label that matches why you are saving this highlight today.
Quote
Use it when the language is the prize: rhythm, image, a line you want in your ear, independent of a full analysis.
What you are capturing: how it is said—a sentence you would read aloud or copy into a commonplace book.
Example
Text: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”
Label: Quote — even though it also names a historical theme, the reason to mark it is often the sentence itself.
If you are mainly using the line as evidence for a character reading or a thematic argument, use Character or Theme; reserve Quote for “I want the words.”
A quick decision tree
- Is it first about a person (or the narrator) in a concrete moment? → Character (or Scene if the beat is what happened next in the plot).
- Is it a turn in the story you need to re-find? → Scene.
- Is it a line you want to keep for how it sounds? → Quote.
- Is it a stable, book-level preoccupation you are collecting examples of? → Theme.
- Is it a self-contained thought or argument, worth lifting as a unit? → Idea.
The categories overlap on purpose: great passages do several jobs. Choose the label that matches the job you are doing in your reading today—you can always add another note on a second pass with a different lens.
See also: Structured Annotation for Deep Reading — why categories help you remember, with screenshots from the app.