Submitted by Ashley Nadeau on
Commonplace books are notebooks or scrapbooks kept by readers and writers to help them reflect upon and remember useful or interesting ideas/concepts. Believed to have originated in the early modern period, commonplace books continued to be popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and could contain a variety of writing (and other media), such as: quotes, letters, poems, prayers, journal entries, recipes, images, or even advertisements.
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How to post:
Submitted by Ashley Nadeau on
1. Join the digital conversation about our course texts by copy and pasting your personal Commonplace Book entries into the comments thread of my "Victorian Literature Commonplace Book" blog.
2. Type up or copy and paste a passage of your choice from the assigned reading. The length of a passage can range from as little as a few sentences to a whole paragraph, dialogue, or page of text. As a general guideline, you might choose a passage of 1-20 lines. It's up to you to determine how much of the original text we need to understand why you felt it was siginificant.
3. Write a couple of sentences about why the passage was selected and what questions it raises about the assigned text or about our course material more broadly.
3. Create a title for your comment that indicates the text and topic you'll be addressing.
4. Be sure to duplicate your post on the shared blog with a personal entry in a separate Word, GoogleDocs, or other processing document.