Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Commonplace Book

By Jessica Gray, University of California, Davis, and Bethany E. Qualls, Université Caen Normandie

Fig. 1: Page from a student's commonplace book.

In our hyper digital world, returning to paper and pen to copy texts, draw pictures and maps, make lists, doodle, and otherwise engage with reading can seem… quaint. But we have found that assigning a term-long commonplacing project affords two related and overarching advantages: 1) it is portable and universal – it can be meaningful to students from all disciplines – and 2) it centers students’ experiences. Here we highlight 13 topics that typify what our students say about their experiences of commonplacing across disciplines, hoping to give others entry points into this flexible assignment practice.

We draw on our experiences teaching English literature and university writing courses of all levels at University of California, Davis, a public university of roughly 40,000 students. Highly ranked in veterinary medicine, agriculture and forestry, and other biological and physical sciences, UC Davis has a high proportion of STEM majors (54% of the student body as of fall 2023).[1] With so many STEM students in our general education classes, cross-disciplinary engagement is critical. We also have a significant population of first generation, international, and transfer students, meaning many of our students are navigating new social and academic cultures. We teach on the quarter system, with 10 weeks of instruction and 1 week of finals, meaning little flexibility in terms of pacing.

We have both assigned a commonplacing project that engages students in deliberate observation, engagement, and reflection. Students practice paying attention to language, selecting snippets of text to include in their commonplace book. Engaging with the material takes various forms; an end-of-term reflection lets students engage in metacognitive exploration about their own reading practices, making those intellectual processes material and durable.

Jessica first developed a commonplace book assignment in spring 2018 for ENL 10A: Literature in Englishes to 1700. It proved so successful she’s adapted it to basically everything she teaches – ENL 3: Introduction to Literature (Fall 2018–now), ENL 115: Topics in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Literature (Fall 2022), ENL 40: Introductory Topics in Literature (Fall 2022), ENL 123: Topics in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Winter 2023), ENL 149: Topics in Literature (Spring 2023), ENL/LIN/UWP 106: English Grammar (Fall 2023), ENL 117: Shakespeare (Summer Sessions 2023 and 2024), and UWP 101: Advanced Composition (Winter and Spring 2024). Inspired by this success, Bethany adapted Jessica’s assignment for her ENL 123 (Winter 2024). We estimate roughly 800 students have created some kind of commonplace or field notebooks in our courses at UC Davis. We’ll let them lead from here:

1. Historical immersion and portability

“As the project went on, I started to look more into context, not just what was being said but also why and how. This helped me get a better understanding of how content and form work together in literary works as well. It has more in common with coding than I thought.” – Computer Science major in UWP 101: Advanced Composition (no assigned literary readings)

When Jessica first set up a commonplace book assignment for an early periods survey course, she encouraged students to historicize the practice. Based on student feedback, over the years she has incorporated the assignment into all her courses. Outside of literature courses, she often frames the project as a “field notebook,” a term that preserves the project’s spirit while helping students connect with a conceptual framework they may find more comfortable. Commonplacing has been inordinately helpful for engaging non-English majors; they frequently express surprise at how well it helps them bridge the gap between literary methods and their usual reading practices.

Bethany first encountered eighteenth-century commonplacing in her undergrad early novels course and wanted to give students a similar, physical experience of the practice. Her assignment’s final reflection gave students the option to discuss if commonplacing helped them better relate to early modern readers (the answer was often no). In general, our students don’t find the practice to be as old-timey as we thought they might.

2. 21st-century students

“I found myself wanting to write in my field notebook outside [the] class requirement. It gave me inspiration to note more down. Overall, I enjoyed the experience a lot because I could decide the direction. It was more free, different from my usual structured assignments.” – English major in ENL 149: Topics in Literature 

Post-2020 pandemic, student engagement patterns have clearly changed. They expect to have agency over the form that their inquiries take, and they want to feel personally represented in the work they produce. The commonplace book offers a chance for students to stretch themselves, plus puts non-majors and majors on more equal footing. Call it #relatablecontent.[2]

3. Paper

“Writing things down by hand helped a lot with memory too, and just understanding the material. I already knew that there were studies about this, but trying it myself I really saw what a huge difference it made. I should have been doing that more.” – Senior in UWP 101

Requiring the commonplace book to be on paper foregrounds the tactile experience and the embodied practice of learning. Paper allows information processing to work differently, creating new connections by writing instead of typing.[3] Intellectually, most students “know” the benefits of note taking by hand, but many are still surprised to notice the difference when they are required to actually try it themselves. 

Fig. 2: Pages from Rayana Keighley's commonplace book for Bethany's ENL 123, Selling Sex, Work, and Texts: Literature from the Deep Eighteenth Century.

4. Visual and kinesthetic learning

“I really loved that we could add drawings and pictures and just arrange things on the pages however we wanted. Writing out the lines in shapes that matched the language made things click for me that I missed when I read them on the page.” – Design major in ENL 3

Commonplacing lends itself nicely to multimedia modalities, which is especially helpful when doing visual media (graphic satire, comics, etc.). Even when teaching “traditional” texts, encouraging learners to “translate” them into visual forms can be transformative. 

In Bethany’s class some students decorated their pages with stickers, glued-in image printouts, even drew their own pictures. Visual representations give students insights into their own thought structures and thinking practices. Color coding and other organizational strategies for de-constellating, or otherwise consolidating, can also help students prepare for paper proposals, rough drafts, and content-oriented exams. These organizational practices offer another way to tie the visual and scientific together, building on systems like those used by John Locke and others.[4]

5. Evidence via patterns

“I thought the commonplace book would help me learn more about the content, but I was not expecting to learn so much about how reading really works. Instead of just talking about tone, I can actually see and show how the specific words are working.” – A first year student in ENL 3

To put it very broadly, a lot of human knowledge in both the humanities and sciences has come from the simple proposition “Examine closely, then analyze.” While every literature class incorporates close reading strategies, some students – particularly non-majors – struggle to connect those strategies to the forms of critical thinking that they expect to need after college. 

Commonplacing makes the underlying structure of critical thinking material, visible, and concrete. Jessica’s prompt explicitly underlines these elements: “The study of language, like botany or zoology, is an evidence-based discipline, and my hope is that this project will encourage you to approach it with a focus on careful, detail- oriented observation and analysis.” Students take this advice seriously.

Literary-minded readers have long been applying this analytical practice – still the basis of science today – and this exercise helps students understand how broadly applicable literary analysis skills are to their overall progress as independent (but not solipsistic) thinkers. In short, they get to see that they have a brain (h/t Paulo Friere).[5]

6. Dealing with unfamiliar materials

“In the past, I felt like I only noticed quotes that would directly feed a potential essay. [The commonplace book] felt more like a scrapbook or diary, rather than a [traditional] assignment. With that pressure removed, I read the texts in a different way than I ever had before.” – English major in Jessica’s ENL 123

Commonplacing builds in an accessible casualness that helps students reading new kinds of texts, especially in unfamiliar language (whether prose from the 1600s or scientific analysis). They are in conversation with the text, whether that means cursing at characters they hate or pulling out new terms and ideas to ask about in class. Many students use their commonplacings as material for informal posts, discussions, or to brainstorm paper topics.

7. Active consumption

“The field notebook taught me to take a step back from being in the ‘writer’ headspace and realize the importance of being in a ‘reader’ headspace. Moving to a different headspace allowed me to feel more [relaxed] and more aware of what I was reading and how I noticed my reactions to the texts.” – Professional Writing minor in UWP 101

Today’s college students are digital natives; they often prefer their media to be interactive. They follow and respond to peers’ ideas, thoughts, and reactions on social media; many create and/or curate their own content for an audience as well. In this way, active reading is not a new concept for them, and – with thoughtful framing – a commonplace book assignment can help them apply familiar patterns of discourse and synthesis to intellectual work. Words matter. What readers do with them matters too.

8. Holistic, cross-disciplinary learning

“I mean, we are basically anatomizing these texts.” – English major in ENL 115

Jessica’s ENL 115 course focused on how theories of knowledge production evolved in the early modern period. Building upon Francis Bacon’s philosophical and fictional visions of the ideal conditions for producing natural knowledge, experimental methods of studying nature emphasized observation and detailed documentation. Discussing some Royal Society of London fellows’ writing, students noticed how some of those prescribed practices echoed their own commonplace book work. English/STEM double majors were in their element.

9. Reflection & metacognition

“I challenged some unexamined constructs I held, and underlying insecurities I usually ignored. I was raised Catholic, attended a decade of Catholic school, and grew up in a more socially conservative culture. While I would tell myself that at an older, more experienced age, where the grip of religion is more of a memory than a reality, texts like these would be no different from any other, why then did something like Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure make me deeply uncomfortable?… Clearly, what I had thought I left behind did not leave at all, it was only forgotten.” – History major in Bethany’s ENL 123

The value of metacognition in academic writing is well established; the reflective assignment ties the commonplacing experience together at course’s end.[6] Some students talk about how their reading and commonplace techniques changed over time, others about their relationship to course contents. The results sometimes surprise with their rawness and depth. In Bethany’s class focused on sex work narratives, for example, many students reflected on how their understanding of sex work as work changed over the quarter.

10. Low-stakes sustained ambiguity

“Instead of putting words down that I thought my professor would want to see, I wrote what I truly felt and believed.” – Senior English major in Bethany’s ENL 123

In the dissertation writing phase, and especially post-pandemic, we both relearned the importance of recognizing incremental progress – giving yourself credit for chipping away gradually at a large-scale goal. On the quarter system, offering our students the opportunity to celebrate their own sustained attention to exploratory work is difficult. A commonplace book project offers them a low-stakes way to experiment with their own process, work at their own pace, and know that they are going to get “credit” for time-consuming intellectual work that we often expect them to perform before drafting papers (often without it directly reflecting in their grade).

11. Life-long learning/noticing

“It also made me appreciate the content I was exposed to in my day-to-day life, because I was extra aware of it, debating if I wanted to include it in my notebook. [...] I think I’m going to keep doing it.” – Senior in UWP 101

Look, you’re still reading, so we bet you are also interested in life-long learning. Giving a semi-structured way to notice, note, and mark in a classroom setting helps develop a skill set that smoothly slides into non-academic contexts. 

12. Easy grading/evaluation

“The flexibility let me relax and do whatever was most helpful for me. Going through my notebook and seeing my progress over time was rewarding: my analysis became more meaningful with practice. It taught me the importance of slowing down and engaging more.” – Senior Cognitive Science major in UWP 101

We both prioritized low-risk, high-reward evaluation criteria for this assignment, for all of the reasons discussed above.[7] One happy byproduct: grading becomes streamlined and efficient, particularly when giving clear rubrics ahead of time. If the student has produced a physical commonplace book and made an effort to respond meaningfully to the prompt, they can easily earn full credit. Neither of us has seen any indication that students take advantage of the assignment’s flexibility by doing less rigorous intellectual work; instead, student reflections and evaluations frequently confirm that the low stakes actually increases their motivation along with the value they take from the work. 

13. Materializing the “Scholarly Conversation”

“I found it to be helpful for engaging in the text in a casual way. You don’t always have something literary to say about every page, but I liked having the freedom to allow myself to go ‘wtf is going on here.’ Especially with the assigned texts, which were about 90% wtf.… Sometimes one of those casual comments would be a seed to develop for a later discussion post and I might have forgotten any of those little bits in the reading process.” – Senior in Bethany’s ENL 123

Conversing privately with their own thoughts allows students to rehearse approaches to uncomfortable or thorny topics they will discuss with their peers. This process undoes the solipsism of thinking they should write about the “right” thing, or feelings about what they read as in a vacuum disconnected from other parts of their lives. 

Students report that commonplacing helps them map out how they relate to the texts (sometimes by drawing literal maps!) and make connections to pop culture, previous experiences, even other coursework. Literature instructors are often understandably wary of the drive to make everything “relatable,” but this project offers a way for students to meaningfully explore those relationships on their own terms, a key component of good scholarship.

A Final Note: Iteration

“I can think of 100 ways to adapt that. What class wouldn’t it work for?” – Participant in a pedagogy workshop at the 2024 Shakespeare Association of America Annual Meeting

We have assigned versions of the commonplace book over 20 times in courses with students at all levels with very different investments in the course material. It is an extraordinarily elastic and forgiving assignment. It lends itself well to literature classes, of course, but as an active reading exercise it adapts quickly for a variety of courses and learning contexts. Every batch of student reflections on the experience reinforces the value of the assignment in new ways. You can find our prompts here as a starting point. We hope you’ll be inspired to develop a similar project and make it your own.

Notes

[1] https://aggiedata.ucdavis.edu/.

[2] Vimala C. Pasupathi, “Teaching with Commonplace Books in the Age of #relatablecontent,” in Using Commonplace Books to Enrich Medieval and Renaissance Courses, eds. Sarah E. Parker and Andie Silva, 75–98.

[3] Maja van der Velden, “‘I Felt a New Connection between My Fingers and Brain’: A Thematic Analysis of Student Reflections on the Use of Pen and Paper during Lectures,” Teaching in Higher Education 28, no. 4 (May 2023): 784–801, https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2020.1863347.

[4] Julie Park, “Line Making as Life Writing: Graphic Literacy and Design in Eighteenth-Century Commonplace Books,” Eighteenth-Century Life 48, no. 1 (January 2024): 72–91, https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-10951326.

[5] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).

[6]  Raffaella Negretti, “Metacognition in Student Academic Writing: A Longitudinal Study of Metacognitive Awareness and Its Relation to Task Perception, Self-Regulation, and Evaluation of Performance,” Written Communication 29, no. 2 (April 2012): 142–79, https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088312438529.

[7] Sarah E. Parker, “Coda: Managing The Commonplace Book Assignment: Putting This Volume To Practice,” in Using Commonplace Books to Enrich Medieval and Renaissance Courses, eds. Sarah E. Parker and Andie Silva, 175–84.

About the Authors

Jessica Gray is a lecturer in English and in the University Writing Program at the University of California, Davis. She completed the PhD in Literature, with a Designated Emphasis in Science and Technology Studies, at UC Davis. She has presented and published on early modern science, reproductive metaphors of knowledge production, and performance-based pedagogy. In addition to teaching literature and writing courses, she is currently helping to develop curriculum for a series of science communication workshops designed to help scientists articulate their research to policymakers and the general public.

Bethany E. Qualls is a postdoctoral fellow for the Punch's Pocket Book Archive at the Université Caen Normandie, France. A scholar of the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, she completed her PhD in English Literature at the University of California, Davis, where she taught both as a graduate student and lecturer. Bethany has published on gossip, new media, and writing as praxis in Eighteenth-Century Fiction; NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies; ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830; and the collection A Spy on Eliza Haywood (Routledge, 2021) as well as created public-facing resources for Layers of London about William Hogarth’s Harlot and Rake and Syllabus on sex work literature past and present. She also works as a general academic editor for Broadview Press and recently launched the podcast Re(un)Covered, which presents archival recovery work to wider audiences.