When I read on my writers mailing list this morning I was confronted with the term “commonplacing” for the first time. I had heard the word a few times before but I always thought it was something else in my head than what it really means.
But what is commonplacing?
According to the Writing Cooperative commonplacing is the act of compiling knowledge for future reference. Countless people throughout history have created commonplace books to catalog the knowledge they’ve learned from life experience, books, mentors, and peers.
When I was a kid I remember that my mother always carried a small notebook in her handbag in which she recorded all sorts of things like recipes, knitting tricks and everything that concerned household, even some poetry verses by Hafez. At that time I didn’t know she was keeping a commonplace book. What I felt as a little girl was that this commonplace book was a part of my mother’s personality.
I don’t remember ever holding a notebook in the physical sense. My first notebook was the PDA which was trendy about before the cell phone era.
Today for 5 years Trello has been my digital commonplace book. It’s ubiquitous, available everywhere you have internet access, you don’t need erasers for it, and you can create as many lists as you like and categorize them as you like and move, delete, archive them as you like, whatever you want to do with them. And they will never get lost, they are always with you everywhere, outgoing you have an internet connection.
But there are also hundreds of offline apps for notes which you simply have on your mobile phone with you.
All in all, internet, in particular google has erased commonplacing from our lives. I mean who wants to write down a recipe for a chocolate cake today where you get thousands of recipes simply by one click and that also in all details on video. And if you want to write down a personal recipe then comes again your mobile phone to use which has also a camera and your concept can be visualized step by step just by clicks…
By Niki Nazemi