how (& why) to start a commonplace book

I get questions about my commonplace book all of the time I actually think it might be the thing I'm asked about most commonplace books were particularly popular during the Renaissance period but we are definitely having a Renaissance now there seems to be so much more interest in commonplacing in the last few years I know that quite a few people online have started using commonplacing and I've been keeping my own one for roughly a year now um very much inspired by early modern practices and specifically John lock a commonplace book is basically a place for storing

a collectic things compiling different things together in one single place and making your own sort of Encyclopedia ideas information facts quotes all of these go together into your own handheld pocket commonplace book and you're able to keep them all together and store them keep hold of them make sure that they don't get lost many great thinkers have kept commonplace books for example Oscar wild Ian fer John Lock many people during the early modern period actually because as I say it was very popular then I'm going to be talking about how and why I use my

Common Place book um in this video but if you do want to learn more and you want to go a bit further with this you want to learn more about how commonplacing can help you think can help you with research projects can help you to put together information and synthesize thinking in ways that you wouldn't necessarily expect to I've actually filmed an 8 episode class on skola um all about commonplacing and how you can use it to cultivate curiosity so if you watch this and you want to go further um then then um definitely consider

doing that it's basically this video but a deeper dive skillshare is of course the world's largest online learning community and I have wanted to add to this community and like add to the repertoire of classes for such a long time and I've actually now done that so um if you are interested to learn then please do click on the link in the description box if you're interested the first 500 people to click on the link in the description box can also get one month of skillshare for free which is kind of amazing so if you're

interested to do my class um or any of the many many many other classes that they have on scho then um do you consider clicking on that link honestly there are so many things you can learn on scho Shure um and every time I scroll through I'm kind of overwhelmed by just how many choices there are but anyway with that said let's get on to this slightly more succinct guide to um common placing which hopefully still will be very very helpful common placing is essentially very very simple and possibly more simple than you expect it

to be I can almost guarantee that you've been common placing without realizing that you are common placing because as Adam Smite says uh he's an early modern uh academic and critic and um when speaking about early mod England he says that um it was more than just people using commonplace books but it was a commonplacing culture he's pointing to the practice the act of collating information of active reading which collates information and commonplacing um in this slightly broader understanding is definitely something that we all do even on your phone when you take screenshots of quotes

or Graphics or images um and store them together in a folder you are engaging in an act of commonplacing because all commonplacing essentially is is compiling ideas information um media and content under different headings and um kind of sorting them into your own categories and there are so many different modes types of common placing like guides to Common placing which have been published over the centuries there isn't kind of like a single right way to do it but I'm going to talk through how I commonplace which is a variation on the John Lock method I

basically like to think of your commonplace book as your own mini Encyclopedia of things that interest you so this is like an encyclopedia of my brain and Encyclopedia of the things that I find interesting and that of course is going to be very different what you would put in your own like kind of Encyclopedia of your interests because obviously they're going to be different and that's the beauty of a commonplace book that they are just so individual you could also use commonplace books for different things um so this is my general commonplace book but this

is if I can find it because I just been losing stuff left right and Center recently I'm pretty sure I've got one here yes okay this one um but then this is for juvenalia specifically um I've also got ones for all of the different essays that I did during my Master's Degree so you can either keep a general one or you can keep it related to a specific theme and that kind of thematic commonplacing is something that you might remember from A Series of Unfortunate Events if you were a fan of that book series and

television series because K clouse of course does keep a commonplace book a dark blue commonplace book where he um compiles all of this information related to vft and by putting all of this information side by side he's able to draw connections between things which we wouldn't necessarily expect to be linked so to set up your book very very easy I would first of all recommend just going through and numbering the pages if they're not already numbered so this one is a lum 197 notebook and these come already numbered which honestly makes them very good for

common placing um but if it's not numbered then just go through and number it first of all and you also want to leave some space at the beginning for your index so there are many different types of common placing but the one that I adhere to is a variation on the loan method so I'm going to introduce you to this um method because it's my personal favorite and I think it's the easiest one to use so when you commonplace you store information under specific headings so for example here these are all quotes related to writing

the act of writing and some common places will um have all of these alphabetically so writing would be right at the end of this notebook but I feel like that's unnecessarily complicated because you don't necessarily know when and what you are going to want to like write about because you don't know what you've read yet John Lock's method however says that you just write the heading as and when you come across it which I think makes so much more sense and this is a method that John Lock set out in his 1685 book which was

a new method of making commonplace books which sets out the method of commonplacing which he himself had been following for quite a long time period so just to give you an example these are the kinds of headings that I've got in mind and these have just come up as I've been reading so I didn't kind of go through and add these in at the beginning um so for example when I read uh this poem by Katherine Phillips so if my ink through malice proved to stain my blood should justly wash it off again and that

was from a poem by kathern Phillips and I wrote that Under The Heading of writing and then when I read this quote from Robert Blair fled forever as they never had been I um thought that would that was also relevant to writing so I added that under that same heading didn't write a new but obviously in having all of these eclectic headings the important part is the index and I do keep an index but I do not keep the kind of index which John Lock recommends so John Lock recommends an alphabetical index very similar to

the kind of thing that you would getting in cyclopedia so you separate the page into boxes a box for every letter of the alphabet and then this gives you space to kind of fill in your headings alphabetically however honestly I'm just so bad with spacing that I decided not to do this and have a much more basic index instead I just put the heading and then I put the page number next to it and it's not quite as intuitive as John locks maybe when I finish this Common Place book and I start another one I

will um try the John loock method but this is what I do and I find that it works really well so this for example is my index and as you can see for some of the headings that are multiple page numbers and I love this because if I realize that I want to find a quote on friendship I know that I need to go to page 31 and then these are all crates on friendship and that is the method that is all you need to know about commonplacing but um going to go a tiny bit

further I want to tell you like how I actually use this okay so how do I actually use my Common Place book um I actually have two Common Place Books um but this is my neat one and this is the one that I uh kind of like use actively I do like this to be fairly neat though and espe especially if I'm sitting in a lecture or I'm uh you know having a conversation with somebody I don't necessarily always have time to neatly write out the quote that I want to write I do like to

keep this fairly neat because um I like to actively use it um and so I have a messy notebook where I will drop things down during the day um so if I'm in a lecture and there's something that I want to write down I might just make a note of it um or if I am having conversation with someone they say something really as you I might just like jot it down in here and then I will just go through this and transfer to this um I've got to say that I haven't updated everything from

here yet though I need to sit down and like go through it all properly similarly and I am actually up to date with this one I will go through my camera roll and look for things that I've screenshotted and transferred those quotes into my Common Place book um I do think it has to be a kind of routine thing and I tried to do about five minutes maybe 10 minutes of common placing every evening because um otherwise it just compiles and you never end up writing down these things that you want to write down you

want to always be adding to your Common Place book also in mind slightly unusually maybe I have vocab lists too so words that I've just learned so that I can uh kind of try and remember them and start using them I also always keep this on me um I kind of treat it a bit like a reading book so if um whenever I'm waiting for somebody um if I've got a spare few minutes I will either read my book or I will read my commonplace book this is just all things that you find interesting and

so of course it's going to be nice to read through I also really like kind of memorizing some of my favorite quotes and so if I'm sitting somewhere by myself I might just go through and try and memorize a few of these um because i' I've saved them for a reason and so why not try and save them up here too that's how I use a commonplace book but now let's go on to the why why do I think you should use a commonplace book and why are they useful number one very very importantly it

makes you an active reader and as opposed to just reading things passively you're always kind of looking for something um you're looking for something that interests you you're looking for something which you can transfer from the book into your own book and it just and I have noticed this actually it just kind of changes the way that you read certain things like when I'm reading really nice passage when I'm uh you know particularly intrigued by an i reading an article I'm thinking okay well how can I transfer this into my Common Place book what is

the core idea what is the best quote that uh can kind of summarize um what I've read here and what I want to remember and I find that it just makes you a slightly more critical thinker and more active when you're reading Carlo tusen who wrote The Kite Runner says reading is an active imaginative act it takes work and common placing encourages us to read actively I think more than that it kind of becomes representative of your power as a reader over the material it kind of gives you ownership of what you're reading and not

in a possessive way but in an empowering way I think reminds you that what you read does impact your own life and can have a very tangible impact on your own life and that's going to happen anyway um but the practice of commonplacing just makes that more clear to you Adam Smite says that it makes quote reading an active interventionalist practice number two and this is kind of the most obvious one but also possibly the most important one it helps you keep track of things and information and just keep them together so that they don't

get lost Michael stalberg calls it a paper technology which I just love because it is a technology it's like it's it's a form of storing information like other technology it's helping you to another particular end like so often litery flowers Floria I think that's what it's called in Latin um they they get lost um like you read these wonderful things you uh learn these wonderful things and then you you lose them even if you write them down if they're in all of these different places if they're eclectically stored you are going to lose them whereas

if you have them here like you've always got them with you and I think there's something wonderful about that I also really like the idea of um kind of widening the Corpus of things that I know that's what helps you to think if you can draw on more things if you can uh kind of if you've got this information and these quotes and these people that you can draw on then that's going to help you to create your own ideas it's going to help you in conversation like especially if you can memorize some of the

things that you're writing down and when I start the importance memorization it's not about uh kind of rate memorization and like reciting something for the sake of reciting it but rather if you know it then you can apply it and you can talk about it and um that's like that's the value of a memorization again Smite says in his essay on commonplace book culture which is definitely worth reading if you're interested in this um and this is him talking about why commonplacing was originally employed in the early modern period quote by deploying these collected quotations

in spoken or written discourse compilers will be led to an eloquence of expression and through this eloquence to a good moral life don't know about the good moral life part but um the eloquence of expression definitely and finally and I would say this is the most important one it helps you to draw connections between things definitely I was alluding to this in the conversation part of that last point it leads you to synoptic thinking and putting things together that you wouldn't usually put together it leads to thoughts which you wouldn't otherwise have had so when

you have like these different quotes from very different places maybe from conversations with friends from television shows from contemporary books from classics from uh you know academic articles and you've got all of these things compiled under a single heading when you read these all together you can think about like how do these things connect how do all of these things relate to education even though they're from all of these different places and it's that that can help you think of something more Innovative uh can help you like create these more creative new ideas that is

where ideas come from common placing just becomes like a physical representation of your brain and your thoughts and helps you to think more clearly but anyway that is commonplacing um I hope that you found this video helpful I know it took me ages to film if you want to learn more about commonplacing as I say then please do consider taking the skillshare class um which will be link down below and you can try for free if you're one of the first 500 people to click if you want to learn any more about common placing then

do let me know as well if you've got any more questions um if there's anything else that I can talk through um let me know because commonplacing is something that I love and that I've become a massive fan of and I could honestly Rave about it for hours so anyway thank you so much for watching and I hope that you have more more than just a productive week