Creating a commonplace book can help you keep track of your educational journey. It’s a place to record favorite quotes from the books you read, ideas you have, and questions that arise from your studies.
Over time, your commonplace book will turn into a record of who you’ve been and how you’ve changed. You can use it to track the progress you’ve made and reflect on the thoughts that have shaped your life. This article will show you how to get started.
What is a Commonplace Book?
A commonplace book is essentially a scrapbook / compilation of information that the creator deems relevant. Commonplace books became popular with thinkers in 15th century England and were eventually promoted as a scholarly tool by major universities such as Yale and Harvard.
Wikipedia puts it this way:
“Commonplace books (or commonplaces) were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books…
Such books were essentially books filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator’s particular interests.”
Personal commonplace books were used by many great writers and thinkers including John Milton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, and Mark Twain.
How Are Modern Commonplace Books Used?
You can, of course, put anything you want in a commonplace book. However, the advent of the internet has made it rather unnecessary to copy down the facts and charts that were recorded in earlier times. Since such info is so readily available, many scholars now use their commonplace books solely as a place to record their intellectual pursuits.
One of the best ways to use a commonplace book is record your interactions with the books you read. Whether you’re studying the classics, devouring science volumes, or doing an in-depth investigation into a particular subject, a commonplace book can help you keep track of important quotes, respond to the text, make connections, and develop your own ideas.
In The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had, Susan Wise Bauer explains the process of using a commonplace book while reading:
“The journal used for self-education should model itself after this extended type of commonplace book. It is neither an unadorned collection of facts, nor an entirely inward account of what’s going on in your heart and soul. Rather, the journal is the place where the reader takes external information and records it (through the use of quotes, as in the commonplace book); appropriates it through a summary, written in the reader’s own words; and then evaluates it through reflection and personal thought. As you read, you should follow this three-part process: jot own specific phrases, sentences, an paragraphs as you come across them; when you’ve finished your reading, go back and write a brief summary of what you’ve learned; an then write your own reflections, questions, and thoughts.”
Using a commonplace book in this way will add a new dimension of depth to your reading. Instead of being a static, one-sided activity, reading will become a dynamic experience.
In the article “Extraordinary Commonplaces,” Robert Darnton explains how keeping such a commonplace book changed the nature of reading for early autodidacts (and how it can change the way you read today):
“Time was when readers kept commonplace books. Whenever they came across a pithy passage, they copied it into a notebook under an appropriate heading, adding observations made in the course of daily life. . . It involved a special way of taking in the printed word. . .They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. 