How to Use Action Tags

Action tags are highlight notes that use a specific syntax to perform actions on the associated highlight. All action tags begin with a . character, and they effect how the highlights appear in Readwise.

Inline Tagging

Readwise has some very powerful features, such as Themed Reviews, that are most useful when they can pull from a pool of tagged highlights. However, setting aside time to go through your recent highlights and tag them appropriately can be cumbersome, and waiting for them to appear in your Daily Review delays the utility of the tag.

This is where inline tags come into play.

Inline tags allow you to add a highlight note wherever you may be reading (Kindle, Kobo, etc.) that will be automatically converted to a tag when the highlight is synced to Readwise. To create an inline tag, start any note with a . and follow it with a single word or abbreviated (no spaces).

For example, let's say you're interested in the subject of probability and you come across a thought-provoking passage describing the difficulty of defining what probability actually means. You want to save this passage for later, so you highlight it. You also want to attach the keyword "probability" so when you see this passage again, you know immediately what it's about. To use inline tagging, simply add the note .probability in addition to the highlight.

That's it! Your highlight is now tagged.

Headings

The heading action tag is a special note taken while you read that captures a book's structure—its parts, chapters, sections, and subsections. Once you've captured this data, the more intuitive location context of chapters becomes available in Readwise.

Even though your highlights from books typically include a page or "location" number, this context is largely meaningless unless you happen to be writing a paper requiring proper citations. For most of us, it'd be far more useful to see location in terms of the highlight's part, chapter, section, or subsection. The heading action tag makes this possible.

To create a heading, simply highlight the title of each section and add a note beginning with a period (.) followed by an h (for "heading") and then the number 1 through 3, representing the section's position in the hierarchy.

For example, with a book organized into parts, chapters, and sections, you would denote all parts as .h1, all chapters as .h2, and all sections as .h3.