What is Commonplacing?

Have you ever been writing a blog, sermon, or even a class syllabus and vaguely remember some quote that you think would fit perfectly? However, you can’t remember the quote, or who said it, or where to go find it again. Commonplacing is the idea of keeping all of your thoughts, ideas, quotes, and musings in one central (common) location (place). It’s a system used for filing away your compiled knowledge for future reference and use.

Commonplace books can take many forms. Many people choose to write their observations in their favorite notebook or journal that travels from place to place with them. Others may keep a digital spreadsheet or online document for their recordings. Some use an index card system for organization. Regardless of your preferred method of tracking your ideas, commonplacing provides an effective way to categorize your thoughts, making it much easier to reference your favorite material in future writing or thinking projects.

Commonplacing is actually a fairly ancient practice, dating all the way back to the Roman Empire. Emperor Marcus Aurelius kept a collection of thoughts and quotes, called his Meditations, that make up the first known commonplace book. Other famous commonplace users include John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Virginia Woolf. American author Steven Johnson explains the importance of commonplacing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries:

Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters—just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. In its most customary form, ‘commonplacing,’ as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations.

Like those with the “intellectual ambition” that Johnson mentioned above, we, too, hope to create a unique portfolio of our thoughts and ideas.

Beyond these “philosophical” reasons, commonplacing also provides some unique practical and tangible benefits for our use. Commonplacing can be a way to commit to memory those things that inspire you. Seeing inspirational material just once will never do the trick of prompting memorization. Copying them down again (and perhaps multiple times) helps you remember things worth remembering. Additionally, commonplacing will help bring order to your life. Collecting and organizing your thoughts on paper or screen will also help order those thoughts within your mind. You will find yourself approaching new texts or ideas logically as you can recognize categories and keywords emerging as themes or lessons within your life. If you have an easily accessible place where all of your favorite ideas and quotes live, your brain will also be able to more easily remember the wisdom and virtue you are consciously recollecting.

Commonplacing is also a way of having a conversation with other writers. Many commonplace users also annotate their commonplace entries. In this way, they are able to not only remember significant quotes and central ideas but also to actively reflect on them. They add to an existing conversation happening between the author and his or her imagined audience.

Commonplacing significantly saves time during the research process. If you decide to write a paper, a blog, or a sermon on the idea of wisdom, you can use your commonplace book to search through every thought and idea you’ve collected about the topic. Then, you can choose which entries best support your ideas or inspire you to consider the topic more deeply. These quotations can become examples in your writing or serve as an entry point for your own unique understanding.

In the history of commonplacing, commonplace books have also been a treasured gift. Especially within the 17th and 18th centuries, Enlightenment thinkers wanted to ensure that future generations continued thinking about the ideas they had spent their lives wrestling with and contemplating. Children and grandchildren inherited their family members’ commonplace books and were able to witness the ideas that shaped their minds and actions. This tradition allows future generations to have access to the wisdom and knowledge you spent a lifetime collecting! What a beautiful legacy to leave behind!

Strategies for Commonplacing

Now that we have discussed the practice and benefits of commonplacing, we wanted to provide you with some practical strategies for how to use commonplacing in your everyday life.

I [Maggie] find most of my commonplace thoughts and ideas while reading texts for school or listening to lectures. Many times, I don’t have the option to immediately record the entry in my commonplace book, so I adopted a system for annotating my books and notes to make sure that I don’t miss commonplace ideas later on. If I come across a quote in my reading that stands out to me, I will write the letters “CP” in the margin. When I finish the book or when I have free time available, I go through the physical copies of my books and write down the quotes in my journals. If I’m looking at an online text, I will annotate using Adobe software to type CP in the margin of the pdf. I will also write CP in my other notebooks where I take notes from class or church. If I come across an idea that I think I would like to write a blog or essay about, I will also add a star by the letters to remind myself to include a more detailed annotation in my journal with my personal reflections.

I try to schedule at least one hour a week to update my commonplace book. For me, this most often happens while we’re watching movies and winding down for the night. Saturday nights are a great time to turn on a film or a game and flip through the materials I’ve been reading for the week. I will also try to add reflections for the entries that I starred or even begin an outline for future writing. Commonplacing does not have to be a strenuous practice; instead, it should be restful and introspective.

There are many different strategies for actually tracking the categories and keywords of your commonplace entries. Most commonplace entries include the following elements:

• Source information (author, title, page number, etc.)

• Keywords or categories

• The copied quote

• Annotations or reflections

• Entry number

Below are a few examples of our own commonplace entries:

I [Maggie] manually record my entries in a designated journal. My example is from my readings for my graduate class on rhetorical theory. As you can see, I include my source information at the top, then enter my quote, and follow the quote with the entry number and keywords.

Karen’s commonplace book is very similar to my own. In her example, she also includes source information at the top, but she combines her keywords beside the entry of the quote.

Trey’s commonplace book is online using GoogleDocs. He begins with the date and the quote entry and then enters the source information at the end. Trey doesn’t use keywords or categories in the same way. Instead, he uses the “find” feature of GoogleDocs to search the keyword, and it will highlight all the entries that contain the keyword.

There are no wrong or right ways to keep your commonplace book. We would encourage you to find a consistent method that works best for your writing and research needs! Commonplacing has been such a beneficial practice in our lives, and we hope that it can enrich yours as well!