In reply to Doug Holton.

Good call Doug.

Tags and links are certainly integral pieces though I tend to think of them as meta data attached to a note, or in the commonplace book tradition, notes are kept under these topic headings as a storage method.

Marginalia with taxonomic words like "metaphor" or "simile" could be the entirety of an annotation, so they feel similar to the reactions category, but could potentially be their own category which we might name "Examples" for lack of a better shorthand? In practice they could be used for collecting evidence for potential patterns as well.

These can also have the feel of highlights or marks which imply a "bookmark" functionality as a note to the user to revisit a place as well. While these are often practiced and should be categorized, they have a desperate laziness to them. If they're truly important, why not write something more substantive contemporaneously and firmly place them into one of the other higher level categories? I find that when I practice such laziness myself, I rarely ever revisit them to do the required work after-the-fact.

This also brings up the idea that some highlights, particularly done in the sense of "I like this turn of phrase" or "there's something unique about this sentence and the language here" don't rise to the level of a quotation with respect to how one may use it later, but that these fit into a sort of "Examples" category as well. I'll also often add a circle with a dot in the margin (and I've seen others highlight or underline) words which they don't know and these could be considered examples (of words one wants to learn) as well.