In a digital age, enjoyable or useful content easily ends up lost in the plethora of information that crosses crowded desks every day. Students’ busy mindsets and many commitments can make it impossible to keep track of everything they want to remember. However, with a bit of effort and some writing supplies, a commonplace book offers a solution that covers many of your journaling needs — from a planner to a collection of lists to a paper Pinterest, a commonplace book helps to form a tangible picture of what matters to you.
Commonplacing gathers existing ideas in a journal, and busy students can use it to catalogue and easily peruse their non-academic interests. With a variety of different approaches, it allows keepers to store whatever speaks to them, whether it’s facts, lyrics, poems, or a grocery list.
The practice originated in Ancient Greece, and in 1706, philosopher John Locke published A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books, which explains how to record a wide variety of ideas and index them so the keeper can approach the real world differently. Other famous figures like Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Jefferson kept commonplace books to document their passions; for example, Woolf glued passages of the Ancient Greek play Agamemnon into her book and copied translations on the opposite pages.
Synthesizing works from other people rather than creating your own might seem counterintuitive, but commonplacing allows you to define your priorities. It’s helpful to have the information you’re interested in together for both personal reference and connection with others, and the longer you keep up the habit, the clearer you’ll be able to see how your identity changes over time.
Commonplacing only requires a notebook and a writing implement, and you can choose any that suit your purpose. Some like to use more colors and make it neat or bright, while others prefer to leave it at black. Some people do both, writing their ideas in a designated messy notebook before transferring them to a clean one, or keeping several books for different topics!
Each commonplacer has their own process — many small choices help you individualize your journal. One of the earliest steps is deciding how to index the entries; Locke organized his additions into overarching categories or topics like war, love, or politics, then added them to an alphabetized index at the start of the book. When citing sources, you can be as meticulous or vague as you like, with options like traditional citations with the author and year of publication or release or an online document to link sources. Whether your interests lie in recipes, conversations, or notes on YouTube videos, what matters is that you include the information that’s important to you.
A commonplace book is a resource to form an intricate collage of your life, with only the content and organization that you choose to include. Every entry varies, and it all depends on what works best for you; if you appreciate the final product, the journal has done its job!
