Commonplace Book
Length: 40 entries
Format:
• Your journal will be submitted online through Turnitin.
• You must have an organization scheme for your book (table of contents)
Assignment:
Over the course of the semester, you will each create your own personalized commonplace
book. A commonplace book is a “a manuscript book in which quotations or passages from
reading matter, precepts, proverbs and aphorisms, useful rhetorical figures or exemplary
phrasing, words and ideas, or other notes and memoranda are entered for ready reference
under general subject headings” (Beal 82). There are many formats and uses for commonplace
books, however the aim of the commonplace books you produce for this class is to encourage
on going engagement with class material and to help you develop critical thinking as well as
eloquent writing and speaking skills.
You can think of the book you’ll be creating as a kind of homemade recipe book (or playbook,
or scrapbook, or greatest hits collection). You can then revisit, use, and reuse these saved ‘word
recipes’ playing with ideas, mastering new ingredients, flavours, and textures in your writing.
Your task is to produce, day by day, a commonplace book this term. Note that you should work
on this regularly (daily!). Add to your commonplace book anytime you find something
interesting, rather than trying to complete it the day before it is due!
The entries in the book should be of value to this course, and will often derive from this course,
but you may encounter them anywhere in your academic and personal lives. You can (and
should) continue the commonplace book afterward since it will be useful for future writing
endeavors and a pleasure to consult when it’s brimming with customized material. You must
create 80 entries for this assignment.
For an example of a commonplace book see:
In your case, you will tailor your commonplace book to this class!
Requirements for entries
• An entry must be useful, interesting, or notable for you—something you want to
remember for future reference and eventually deploy. The entries aren’t there to help
or impress anyone else, including the professor (me!) so there is nothing too basic or
too arcane to include.
• If it’s a single word, then it needs a memory aid or definition (it doesn’t have to be a
true dictionary definition). For instance, you could simply write “Griffin = lion + eagle”
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which would get full marks as an entry, or draw a picture of the mythological creature
instead of using words.
• For quotes, cite a source. No citation is needed for idiomatic expressions, proverbs, or
maxims.
Suggestions for entries
• Include fresh, exciting, inspiring, meaningful, intriguing or confusing quotations,
phrases, words encountered in your daily readings and listenings. These are things that
you, in the near or distant future, might want to explore or analyze in your writing, or to
incorporate into your writing repertoire.
• Academic and literary forms of writing often feature many (some might say too many)
terms drawn from ancient and foreign languages (especially Latin and French). In our
class you may also encounter words from make believe languages. You could include
translations or definitions of these!
• If you Google search “define somewordhere,” you’ll get a quick definition of the word
and a basic word history (etymology). For the best information, check
(if at home, access it through the CBU proxy).
• For students who have learned English as an additional language, it might be useful to
include colocations (words that frequently occur together) and large ‘lexical chunks.’ For
instance, although put, up, and with are extremely common and ‘easy’ words, the
colocation “I won’t put up with that” has a special meaning that needs to be
remembered on its own. If possible, include a context, which will give a sense the
linguistic register for this entry (formal, casual, and beyond).
Requirements for the book
• It must have an organization scheme that puts the entries into groupings of some kind.
Create a system that works for you. Perhaps you’ll have 5-10 groups of 10-20 entries.
You can consult other commonplace books and borrow their arrangements if you want.
Here are two examples to spark your imagination:
Example Organization System 1
• New terms the prof used verbally
• Interesting quotes from texts we read
• Amusing slang terms
• Powerful verbs for academic essays
• Foreign words used in English
• Fairy tale memes
Example Organization System 2
• Elegant sentences I wish I had written
• Song lyrics with rhetorical figures
• Grammar keywords
• Words that sound beautiful to the ear
• Words I always misspell
Suggestions for the book
• It could be—but doesn’t have to be—decorated and made beautiful.
• You can include pictures if they’re helpful for the entry
• Colour-coding (or by font, style, size etc.) could be useful.
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Evaluation Criteria
• Did you hit 80 entries?
• Are the entries relevant and useful for your learning process?
• Does the organizational scheme exist and make the book more useful to you as a
writer?
Use of AI
Do not use generative AI in the creation of your commonplace book. This includes software like
ChatGPT, but also many translating software as well as programs like Grammarly. If you are in
doubt, check with me! Note that I may request version history of all assignments.
Bibliography and Further Reading
I am grateful to Dr. Jon Doering for sharing his own commonplace book assignment instructions
with me. This assignment draws extensively on his assignment.
Beal, Peter. Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology 1450–2000. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007.
Stolberg, Michael. “John Locke’s ‘New Method of Making Common-Place-Books’: Tradition,
Innovation and Epistemic Effects.” Early Science and Medicine 19 (2014) 448-470.
“The Topics of Invention.”
http://rhetoric.byu.edu/Canons/Invention/topics_of_invention/topics.htm
“Commonplace Books Are Like a Diary Without the Risk of Annoying Yourself”:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/magazine/commonplace-books-recommendation.html
“’Commonplace Books’: The Tumblrs of an Earlier Era”:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/commonplace-books-the-tumblrs-
of-an-earlier-era/251811/
“John Locke’s Method for Common-Place Books (1685)”:
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/john-lockes-method-for-common-place-books-
1685/
