Commonplace book

What It Means

A commonplace book is a notebook where you copy passages, quotations, facts and ideas from what you read, grouped under topic headings so you can find them again and put them to use. The practice, called commonplacing, was widespread among scholars in Renaissance and early modern Europe. It differs from a diary, which records your own days in date order, because a commonplace book is sorted by subject.

How People Say It

• "That quote's going in my commonplace book."
• "I keep a notebook of lines I like, sorted by topic."
• "Let me look under 'Money' in my notes."

The Breakdown

How to keep one

1. Pick one notebook or one digital folder and keep it for this alone.
2. When a passage, fact or idea is worth keeping, copy it in by hand or type it, word for word.
3. Write where it came from: the book, the page, the person.
4. Put it under a topic heading, such as Work, Parenting, Money or Health.
5. Keep an index at the front or back listing each heading and the pages where it appears.
6. Before you write, plan or decide something, look up the heading and read what you've gathered.

Short version to try today. Copy one sentence you liked this week into a notebook, write its source under it, and give it a one-wordWord of the yearOne word a person picks to guide their year, or the word a dictionary names as best summing up a year. See more heading.

Commonplace book next to similar notebooks

Where It Comes From

The name refers to the topic headings, called commonplaces, that passages were copied under. Harvard historian Ann Blair writes that Renaissance humanists stockpiled notes on a scale not seen before, helped by the wider availability of paper and a new abundance of books, and that copying was widely believed to press a passage into memory. Thomas Jefferson kept a Literary Commonplace Book from 1758 to 1772, now held by the Library of Congress.

Good to Know

Always note the source beside what you copy, so you can check it and credit it if you quote it later. Steps 1, 3, 5 and 6 above are Buhata's own suggestions for a modern notebook; the historical practice centered on copying under headings for later retrieval.

Related Terms and Categories

• Zettelkasten

  A note system, German for "slip box", where each idea gets its own numbered note linked to related notes; made famous by sociologist Niklas Luhmann.

• Second brain

  Tiago Forte's name for a digital store of the notes and ideas you save, organized so you can find them and reuse them in your own work.

• Bullet journal

  Ryder Carroll's notebook method for tracking tasks, events and notes with short entries and symbols, organized into an index and daily, monthly and future logs.

• Note-taking methods

  The common ways to lay out notes from a class, meeting or reading, such as the Cornell, outline, mapping, charting and sentence methods.

• PARA method

  Tiago Forte's system for organizing notes and files into four folders: Projects, Areas, Resources and Archives.

Productivity methods and focus