bluegreen17: (Default)
bluegreen17 ([personal profile] bluegreen17) wrote2004-09-19 07:14 pm

about commonplace books

...early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book.[i think i was one of those dudes in an earlier incarnation.] 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. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality. . . . The era of the commonplace book reached its peak in the late Renaissance, although commonplacing as a practice probably began in the twelfth century and remained widespread among the Victorians. It disappeared long before the advent of the sound bite. -- Robert Darnton, "Extraordinary Commonplaces," The New York Review of Books, December 21, 2000

An early practitioner of reflective journaling was Thomas Jefferson. He would synopsize and capture the key points of his readings and add his own reflections, recording them in a journal which he called his 'commonplace book.' One of his biographers quoted Jefferson as saying 'I was in the habit of abridging and commonplacing what I read meriting it, and of sometimes mixing my own reflections on the subject' (Cunningham, 1987, p. 9). His tutor, James Maury, commended the practice as a means 'to reflect, and remark on, and digest what you read' (Wilson, 1989, p. 7).-Herman W. Hughes, Dialogic Reflection: A New Face on an Old Pedagogy

[identity profile] syndeeloohoo.livejournal.com 2004-10-08 06:45 am (UTC)(link)
I'm really late in responding to this one. I loved this post! I had no idea there was such a term for this, and if I understand it correctly, I guess I am in the process of continually making my own commonplace book! I read voraciously, take notes and excerpts, and add them to notebooks where I piece them together with my own comments, notes and extrapolations. I have them all categorized and labeled and everything. I am such a geek but I sure have fun! LOL I am just glad to know there is such a term for this kind of thing now.