Commonplacing

Back when I was a kid, my family didn't have a huge number of books, but we did have access to a good local public library. So every couple of weeks we would go to the library and I would get out three or four books to take home with me. Because I was reading interesting things and I had to return the books, I would copy the interesting bits into little notebooks so that I could keep them and read them later when I wanted to.

I didn't know it then but I was following a practice honored by time from an earlier era when books were rare and expensive and scholars travelled large distances to read a manuscript copy of a book that interested them. The notebooks that they kept were called 'commonplace books' and the practice of note-taking was called 'common-placing'.

The 16th century Dutch scholar, Desiderius Erasmus, wrote in his De Copia:

Prepare for yourself a sufficient number of headings and arrange them as you please, subdivide them into the appropriate sections and under each section add your commonplace and maxims; and then whatever you come across in any author, particularly if it is rather striking, you will be able to note down immediately in the proper place, be it an anecdote or a fable or an illustrative example or a strange incident or a maxim or a witty remark or a remark notable for some quality or a proverb or a metaphor or a simile. This has the double advantage of fixing what you have read more firmly in your mind, and getting you into the habit of using the riches supplied by your reading.

Nowadays, you can use a software package like Microsoft OneNote to keep a collection of things that you have encountered in your reading on the Web, and it will also track the website where you read it should you wish to find it again or to reference it, and even allow you to search for things within what you have collected. Yet one of the advantages of copying something down in your own handwriting is that it forces you to think about it more and remember it better than it would if you had just highlighted a passage and copied and pasted it.


Of course now, I have a lot of books and I tend to highlight and underline things that really stand out for me. But I can still recommend the practice of commonplacing for a number of reasons:

• Convenience: You have a lot of interesting things you have read in one place and at your fingertips, rather than having to remember which book you may have read something in and the find it.
• Accessibility: If your commonplace book is small enough you can carry it with you for dipping into when you are between appointments or waiting in a queue or simply bored.
• Recall: The very act of copying may help what you have read stick in your memory.
• Self-knowledge: If you look back through the passages that you found interesting enough to copy, then you may get a better feel for what attracts your attention and this may also tell you something about what you may be missing.
• Insight: Reading the same passage at different times under different conditions may lead to you finding things in it that you missed on your initial reading. Over time you may have had more experiences that have changed your perspective so that now a passage says something different and perhaps deeper to you.

So get yourself a notebook and experiment with commonplacing.

Like most things, it won't work for everyone, but if it works for you then you will have found yet another way to enhance your learning.

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For an interesting take on commonplace books, have a look at:

Commonplace Books and the Teaching of Style by Lynee Lewis Gaillet