ENGAGE

BRAIN
How to record, retrieve and remember
what inspires you (rather than
settling for digital oblivion)

BY A SPEECHWRITER

i
 CONTENTS

The Challenge 1
Why I Commonplace 2
What’s In Our Heads? 4
How I Got Into Commonplacing 6
Why We All Need To Commonplace 8
How I Do Commonplacing 10
How I Work Out What’s Worth Commonplacing 12
What Are Commonplaces Used For? 14
How Commonplacing Improves Creativity 16
Commonplacing As A Way Of Life 18
The Power Of Inventories 19
Commonplacing And Character-Building 21
The Power Of Memorisation 24

ii
 THE CHALLENGE

Like most people, I spend at least an hour a day scrolling through

internet news and related content on my phone or laptop. Then I
close my screen. Ask me five minutes later what I’ve been reading,
the answer would be, ‘I can’t remember.’
In our era, we don’t see the point in memorising things,
because we can look stuff up. The problem is we can now spend
thousands of hours on the internet and have nothing to show for
it. At school we learn things, at university we learn things, but a
few years later, we don’t remember very much.
Can we discipline our minds to be more aware of what we’re
doing? Can we train ourselves to browse with a purpose? Wouldn’t
it be a good idea to have an intellectual equivalent of a savings
account, where we could store our favourite ideas for future
pleasure and profit?
This book explains the art of commonplacing – a way to
become smarter and more conscious of what’s going on in your life.

Brian Jenner
https://thespeechwriter.co.uk

Every intellectual endeavour starts with a note.

Sönke Ahrens

1
 WHY I COMMONPL ACE

I work as a speechwriter. People pay me to make them sound

eloquent. That’s a strong motivation to collect useful material.
But I also do it because it helps me work out what I’m thinking
and what I believe. Meditating on the ideas of great thinkers lifts
my spirits and enriches my creativity.
I may have a natural talent for finding appropriate material,
but I can’t rely on that. It’s much more professional for me to
create files which help me get easy access to the one-liners,
anecdotes and quotations that make the speeches I write memorable
and fun. Comedians like Joan Rivers and Bob Monkhouse never
relied on their sense of humour to get them through; they created
notes indexing thousands of jokes for every occasion.
It’s called the art of commonplacing and it has a long history.
You did it in the Renaissance because, if you wanted to be an
effective leader, you had to do public speaking. These days there
are a lot more platforms to show off your verbal felicity, which is
an added incentive for you to record, retain and reuse the things
you see, hear and care about.

When I come across something I really like in a book,

I put a little dot in the margin.
Nicholson Baker

2
In my commonplace book, for handy reference, I keep things in
categories: ‘food,’ ‘conversation’, ‘social class’, ‘travel’, ‘politics’,
‘cleanliness’, ‘war’, ‘money’, ‘clothing’, etc. I use it as an aide-
mémoire, a kind of external hard drive. It helps me ward off
what Christopher Hitchens, quoting a friend, called CRAFT (Can’t
Remember a F–Thing) syndrome. I use my gleanings in my own
writing. Like Montaigne, I quote others only ‘in order to better
express myself’. Montaigne compared quoting well to arranging
other people’s flowers. Sometimes, I sense, I quote too often in the
reviews I write for The New York Times, swinging on quotations as
if from vine to vine. It’s one of the curses of spending a lifetime
as a word-eater, and of retaining a reliable memory.

Dwight Garner

I write everything out by hand, because it helps me

understand and remember it, but I combine the analogue
approach with the best digital assistance I can find.
John-Paul Flintoff

Gathering raw material in a real way is not as simple as it sounds.

It is such a terrible chore that we are constantly trying to dodge it.
The time that ought to be spent in material gathering is spent in wool
gathering. Instead of working systematically at the job of gathering
raw material we sit around hoping for inspiration to strike us.
James Webb Young, A Technique for Producing Ideas

If you spend a lot of time with genius your mind

will end up bigger and broader than if you spend
your time only with run-of-the-mill stuff.

David Brooks

3
 WHAT’S IN OUR HEADS?

My son has a passion for Lego. He started off with a few small sets.
It got to a stage where he would get a new set, build it and then
dismantle it. My wife bought a huge tray to store all the Lego in
the living room. It became a chaotic soup made up of thousands
of random pieces. Over time my son gave up making his sets
because it was too difficult to find the small pieces.
This is a metaphor for our brains. We absorb thousands of
bits of random information. You’ll have a few opinions on one
matter and a few facts, but it’s rare that you’ll sit down and work
out what you really think about one topic.
We decided to sort the Lego pieces into categories. We bought
drawers to separate them into different colours. Finding the small
pieces became manageable. My son was then able to recreate his
Lego constructions out of the chaos.
This is why commonplacing is such a powerful tool. If we
categorise our knowledge, we can find it again, refresh our memories
and use the material to create new things.

4
Every habit and every faculty is confirmed and strengthened by
the corresponding acts, the faculty of walking by walking, that of
running by running. If you wish to have a faculty for reading, read;
if for writing, write… So generally if you wish to acquire a habit for
anything, do the thing.
Epictetus

We run across an enormous amount of fugitive material which

can be grist to the idea-producer’s mill – newspaper clippings,
publication articles, and original observations. Out of such
material it is possible to build a useful source book of ideas.
Once I jotted in such a book the question ‘Why does every
man hope his first child will be a boy?’ Five years later it
became the headline and idea for one of the most successful
advertisements I ever produced.
James Webb Young, A Technique for Producing Ideas

…a chance remark, a letter from a friend,

an opera programme, an advertisement, the
instruction book for the new washing machine,
a visit to a country church, a notice in a hotel
room or a railway station, any of these things,
or a thousand others, can reveal the unexpected
nugget of pure gold.

John Julius Norwich

You have to externalise your ideas, you have to write. Richard

Feynman stresses it as much as Benjamin Franklin. If we write, it
is more likely that we understand what we read, remember what
we learn and that our thoughts make sense. And if we have to write
anyway, why not use our writing to build up the resources for our
future publications?

Sönke Ahrens

5
 HOW I GOT INTO
COMMONPL ACING

I studied French and German at school. I got into the habit of

keeping vocabulary books to write down the words I didn’t know.
I was so keen I also created an English vocabulary book which
I used to note down the meanings of English words I wasn’t
familiar with.
In the back, I wrote down famous quotations. I didn’t realise
I’d rediscovered a tradition that went back to the Renaissance.
My German teacher used to give us books to read in German.
When we’d finished the book, he asked us to write a short
summary. Later, I adopted this habit for all the important books
I read. I remember writing out the funny anecdotes from John
Lahr’s biography of Joe Orton, Prick Up Your Ears, and I précised
Prince Kutuzov’s thoughts on patience and time, when I finally
finished Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
It taught me that productive reading is a two-step process.
Firstly, you have to make the effort to finish the book. Secondly,
by writing a summary of it, you work out what you thought it was
about. Later, when writing summaries for publication, I realised to
truly get to the essence of a book, it was necessary to identify and
copy out the key sentences or paragraphs.

George Steiner defined an intellectual as ‘quite simply,

a human being who has a pencil in his or her
hand when reading a book’.

6
One day in college I was trawling the library for a good
book to read when I found a book called ‘How to Read a
Book.’ I tried to read it, but must have been doing something
wrong, because it struck me as old-fashioned and dull,
and I could get through only a tiny chunk of it. That chunk,
however, contained a statement that changed my reading life
forever. The author argued that you didn’t truly own a book
(spiritually, intellectually) until you had marked it up.
This hit home for me — it spoke to the little scribal monk
who lives deep in the scriptorium of my soul — and I quickly
adopted the habit of marginalia: underlining memorable lines,
writing keywords in blank spaces, jotting important page
numbers inside of back covers. It was addictive, and useful…
This wasn’t exactly radical behaviour — marking
up books, I’m pretty sure, is one of the Seven Undying
Cornerstones of Highly Effective College Studying. But it
quickly began to feel, for me, like something more intense:
a way to not just passively read but to fully enter a text, to
collaborate with it, to mingle with an author on some kind of
primary textual plane.
Sam Anderson, New York Times Magazine

There is an old saying that the truest form of poverty is:

‘when you have occasion for anything you can’t use it,
because you know not where it is laid.’
Shane Parrish, Farnam Street

7
 WHY WE ALL NEED TO
COMMONPL ACE

In the DVD era, I would watch box sets like The Sopranos or
Six Feet Under. I admired the way they combined the closing credits
with music to round off the emotional experience.
Sometimes after a particularly brilliant episode, I’d feel like
standing up from the sofa and applauding.
Or I might sit there for 10 minutes in silence thinking about
what I’d just watched. Later I might write notes on what I’d
seen, and even follow up references to books or films mentioned
in the episodes.
Now when I watch a brilliant episode of a series on Netflix,
the closing credits start, the music is excellent, but before you
know it, the next episode has started and it’s impossible to rewind.
It’s infuriating.
I’m an advocate of commonplacing because it forces us to
digest what we’ve experienced.
The American professor of medicine Jon Kabat-Zinn coined
a verb, ‘awarenessing’. It means ‘the deliberate action of creating
and sustaining a state of awareness’.
Commonplacing is a habit that forces you to pay attention.
If you’re consuming too much, the root of the problem is, no
sooner have you consumed it, you forget about it.

8
Great storytellers prepare obsessively.

Peter Guber

The potency and meaningfulness of communication is in direct

proportion to the costliness of its creation – the amount of pain,
effort, talent…consumed in its creation and distribution. It may be
inefficient – but that’s what makes it work.

Rory Sutherland, Alchemy

Being of a literary cast of mind, it appeals to me that

Shakespeare’s Hamlet was a keen commonplacer. In the
Renaissance, students were taught to write down striking
phrases and maxims on tablets. And then transfer them to
their commonplace book, in the appropriate ‘place’.

Hamlet: …Meet it is I set it down,

That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;
At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark.
[Writing]
So, uncle, there you are.

The arts of memory are among the arts of thinking,

especially involved with fostering the qualities
we now revere as ‘imagination’ and ‘creativity’.

Mary Carruthers

9
 HOW I DO COMMONPL ACING

A comedy writer once told me that he bought books of jokes

and went through them with a pencil. He ticked the jokes that
he thought were funny. I started doing this because I was often
writing wedding speeches under pressure. Instead of laboriously
going through all the one-liners, I could quickly locate the jokes in
a collection that I thought were funny. And those were the ones
I would feel comfortable putting in someone else’s speech.
It wasn’t long before I would find myself thinking, ‘What was
that brilliant line I remember from ages ago? It would go perfectly
with this speech.’ This was the incentive to start organising my
favourite material into a system. If I found a good line to use for
a eulogy, I would create a heading in a document, EULOGIES.
And then type in the quotation.
I let the document grow alphabetically. I’d find the quotation
first and then either put it under an existing heading or create a
new heading. I’d often find something on the internet, copy it and
paste it in. These days if I find a good passage in a book, I can use
the dictate feature to add it to the collection. My document is now
378 pages, set out like a conventional book of quotations.

10
If you want glory from your books…lock them in your mind, and not
in your bookcase.
Petrarch

We are all Scrap-books; and happy is he who has

his pages systematised, whose clippings have been
culled from sources of truth and purity, and who
has them firmly Pasted into his Book.  

E.W. Gurley, Scrap-books and How to Make Them

In her youth in the 1930s Margaret Roberts kept [a book]

of improving thoughts and poetical quotations which she
selected and copied out. As prime minister, after leaving
office, Margaret Thatcher returned to the genre. Two such
books…survive… Into them, she stuck or wrote out… quotations
which she liked from poetry and prose. They provided her
with inspiration, sometimes for speeches, on such subjects as
liberty, nation, character, prayer, leadership, love, and death
in war. Most were high-minded; many were American; many
were Victorian.
Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher, Volume 3

11
 HOW I WORK OUT WHAT’S WORTH
COMMONPL ACING

When I spot something that may be suitable for one of my

commonplace books, I’ll probably photograph it or scribble it
down. A week later I may decide that it wasn’t so interesting after
all. I either delete it, or not bother transferring it. It’s a filter.
If an idea sticks in my mind, the chances are it will stick in
someone else’s, too.
I also use scrap-books. Whenever I’m browsing the internet
and I find something significant, I use the screenshot feature.
Or if I’m reading a book, I’ll take a photograph of the passage
that has caught my attention. Either I’ll label the photo and put it
in a file on my computer desktop. Or I’ll brighten up the text so
it’s clearly legible, print off the short paragraphs on A4 paper and
cut them out with scissors. Using paper glue, I’ll stick them into
a scrap-book. There’s something quite satisfying about actually
physically cutting and pasting. I’ve acquired a couple of swollen
hardback notebooks. I’ve also got libraries of quotes I’ve collected,
which I can browse like a photo library. They remind me of what
preoccupied me then, and they can yield fresh connections to
what I’m interested in now.

12
Jock Murray’s commonplace book became legendary in his lifetime.
If he had to give an address as President of the English Association
or a short speech at a god-daughter’s wedding he would always dip
into his commonplace book and draw out the perfect proverb or
saying for the occasion. Whenever he came across something wise,
thoughtful, inspiring, witty or simply odd, he would write it into a
tiny blue notebook he kept inside his jacket pocket and then, when
he had time, decant it into the commonplace book proper.

John G. Murray, A Gentleman Publisher’s Commonplace Book

The technique of the commonplace book encourages a particular

habit of reading, not only attending to the author’s argument but
also continually asking oneself whether this phrase or that section
is worth copying out, and if so, considering under which heading it
should go.
Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice

[William] Drake understood reading as digestion, a process

of extracting the essence from books and incorporating them
into himself. He favoured bite-sized bits of text, which could
be useful in their application to everyday life.
Robert Darnton, The New York Review of Books

13
 WHAT ARE COMMONPL ACES
USED FOR?

When I’m writing a speech, I want to say things in such a way

that everyone understands them. In the same way as if I were
giving someone directions to the railway station, I’d refer to easily
recognised landmarks along the way.
When I write something new I’ve no idea how it’s going to
be understood by a live audience. However, if I hear a vicar tell a
joke in front of a large congregation on a Sunday morning, I’ve
witnessed that it works. I can copy it down. A small change in the
content might transform it from a religious joke into a political joke.
This is where the theory of commonplaces came from.
Commonplaces are vivid and memorable ways of saying things.
Before we had the greetings card industry, if you wanted to communicate
with someone, you wrote them a letter. A commonplace book gave
you ideas for what to write on a particular occasion.
In the Renaissance, lawyers used commonplaces in their speeches
to the jury, because they were pithy lines with extra emotional
impact. They’re sentences that everyone can agree with.
At a wedding, the speakers need to express some very familiar
emotions: gratitude, love and hope. Most people express these
sentiments in their own way. My job is to find surprising ways of
saying these familiar things, which will make the audiences
laugh and cry. Often that means adapting tried-and-tested lines
to the speaker and the audience. I make it my business to search
diligently for material which I can easily retrieve when the time comes.

14
In every genus of public speaking what we say must be
accommodated to the ordinary outlook and understanding
of the populus.

Cicero

The rhetorical commonplace is a short-form expression

of common sense or public opinion.
Jay Heinrichs

The commonplace book…marshalled excerpts from sources

invested with the necessary degree of authority ‘to back up your
argument or point of view’.
Ann Moss

Commonplaces - little purple patches.

Walter J Ong

Commonplace books are not so uncommon.

Dwight Garner

…the principle of constantly expanding your experience, both

personally and vicariously, does matter tremendously in any
idea-producing job. Make no mistake about that.
James Webb Young, A Technique for Producing Ideas

Meaning is either dawning or expiring.

Malcolm Bowie

15
 HOW COMMONPL ACING
IMPROVES CREATIVIT Y

Everything has been said.

La Bruyère, Characters, 1688

Writers in the Renaissance used commonplace books because

they didn’t believe in originality. They thought the best we can do
is absorb the models of the greats that came before us, and then
repackage them through our individual creative imagination.
The screenwriter Quentin Tarantino has described his writing
technique, which owes something to commonplacing:
‘I always had a good memory, so I would see a scene from a
movie and I would just remember it. And I’d go home and write it
from memory. And anything else I couldn’t remember or anything
good I came up with in the meantime, I’d add it into the scene –
because it was just my scene. And little, by little, by little I started
adding more, and more, and more to the scenes. And that was
me learning how to write dialogue – or just realising I could
write dialogue.’
Imitation isn’t about copying from great writers. It’s about
being inspired by the rhythm, the structure or the sentiments, and
then emulating the model for your own purposes. Why not copy
Tarantino? Write down the bits of prose you really like and then
add some of your own thoughts.

16
 Commonplacers are like bees stealing nectar from flowers
to store in their hives. In the hives the nectar is turned into
honey, which is their own. As writers, we digest the passages
we borrow from others, and we create something new that
belongs to us.
One of the unexpected consequences of collecting
material to reuse is that I spot other writers doing it. On
television and in films, writers lift or adapt jokes from
other places. One of the smartest ways to say something
memorable is to give a familiar line an unexpected twist.

A lot of things are lying around waiting to be

discovered and that’s our job as writers to just
notice them and bring them to life.

George Carlin

The best way to teach people critical thinking is to teach them to

write because there’s no difference between that and thinking.
Jordan B. Peterson

17
 COMMONPL ACING
AS A WAY OF LIFE

As well as collecting memorable phrases and ideas, I keep a record

of every purchase I make in my daily life. If I buy a cup of coffee
then I record the expense on my app. Some people might see that
as weird, but it’s very much in the spirit of commonplacing.
It promotes awareness of what I’m doing in the moment.
If I finish reading something and I’ve identified passages
I want to archive, I make some time to put the notes in a
particular place. Likewise, if I buy something, I give myself a
moment to remind myself what I’ve done. For example, if I walk
into an airport with £100 in my wallet and then hours later, I
glance inside and I’ve only got £42 left, I will not curse myself
and convince myself I dropped £20 somewhere. I’ll know where
it all went. I’ve trained my mind to pay attention to something
important: my money.

The term ‘adversaria’ was also used as a synonym for commonplace

book. The original Latin term referred to various kinds of collections
in which undigested matter was recorded just as it occurred. It was
used for a book of accounts. Adversaria is a book in which debtor
and creditor are set in opposition.
Richard Yeo

18
 THE POWER OF
INVENTORIES

What hast thou in the house?

Elisha, Kings II, 4, v2

The English word ‘invention’ comes from the same root

Latin word inventio. In classical rhetorical theory, inventio meant
‘brainstorming’.
We tend to believe there are special ‘creative’ types capable of
inventing new things, but the other English word that derives from
inventio is inventory. To create an ‘inventory’ is to painstakingly list
everything you’ve got. It involves sorting, ordering and labelling.
To collect, label and organise information is a way to identify
patterns. If I were to do an inventory of your freezer, I would
learn things about you. If we list the things we do, the things we
own, or the things we like, relationships begin to emerge. These
connections can give us profound insights into our personalities.
To create an inventory is an act that reveals what’s been going
on. You’re gathering written evidence. It’s creative, because a
written record of what’s happened usually uncovers a different
pattern to the vague perceptions in your head. It’s a system to help
you recognise what you’ve actually been doing, not what you think
you’ve been doing.

19
Learning to speak properly meant learning to think properly, and
even to live properly.

H I Marrou

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.

Walter Lippmann

Memory is the faculty by which the mind recalls what has

happened. Intelligence is the faculty by which it ascertains
what is. Foresight is the faculty by which it is seen that
something is going to occur before it occurs.
Cicero, De Inventione

I pick my favourite quotations, and store them in my mind as

ready armour, offensive or defensive, amid the struggle of this
turbulent existence.
Robert Burns

Writing is often the process by which you

realise that you do not understand what you are
talking about.

Shane Parrish

20
 COMMONPL ACING AND
CHARACTER-BUILDING

Reading should not be aimed at erudition;

it should help a man get ahead in the world.
Robert Darnton

Pursue your own personal curiosities beyond school and university

and you’ll keep your mind active. There’s a world described in
articles on the internet and there’s a world described in books.
Books are richer, deeper and less censored. Readers feed their
imagination. Don’t be like those gathered outside the window in
Life of Brian clamouring for their Messiah. ‘You’re all individuals!’
Brian shouts at them. ‘Yes,’ they cry with one voice, ‘We’re all
individuals!’
I admire someone who can make a room of people laugh,
or say something unexpected or memorable. It’s difficult to do.
Nobody expects anyone to be able to do these things well, so
consider what scope there is to excel in these areas.
To get the attention of others, we need to spend time working
out our own thoughts and beliefs. By commonplacing you can
analyse yourself. What quirky perspectives do you have on life?
What unusual experiences have you had? What insights can you
share with others?
Isocrates said: ‘I do hold that people can become better and
worthier if they conceive an ambition to speak well.’

21
What works is being different. Don’t try to be
liked. Find out how you’re different. Then be
that. That’s where the power is.

Dave Trott

A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.

Malcolm X

He is the benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules

of life into short sentences that may be easily impressed on the
memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

Samuel Butler

Training the memory was much more than a matter

of providing oneself with the means to compose
and converse intelligently when books were not
readily to hand, for it was in trained memory
that one built character, judgement, citizenship
and piety.

Mary Carruthers

If you can think, and speak, and write, you are absolutely deadly.
Nothing can get in your way.

Jordan B. Peterson

22
An American public relations expert called James E. Lukaszewski
coined a phrase ‘verbal visionary’. A ‘verbal visionary’ is someone
able to ‘move people through speech power’. He gave a list of
questions you need to ask yourself if you want to lead others. You
can use your commonplace book to answer these questions and
get more personal insights.

• What do you believe? Even though what you believe rarely

changes, say it out loud. Write it down.

• Who are you? Say it out loud. Write it down.

• What are your aspirations? Who, what, where do you want

to be? Write them down.

• What are your principles? Write them down.

• Do you have an inner sense of where you are going? What

do you want to leave behind? What will people remember
about you? Say it out loud. Write it down.

Commonplacing helps you become a reflective person. Reflective

people tend to be less impulsive. They take stock. They see both
sides of an argument. They acquire a deeper sense of fairness.
Make time to cultivate wisdom and eloquence, and you’ll have
something precious to offer in life.

23
 TH E POWE R O F
ME M O RI S ATI O N

This booklet was put together during a time of intense mental stress.
The measures taken by governments to deal with coronavirus
were extreme. They caused huge disruption to our lives.
On YouTube, there is a video of the Jewish theologian
Dr Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg talking about the Psalms. They
were the traditional texts used to deal with anguish. Dr Zornberg
tells a story about how her grandmother, who was a great reader,
became blind. But she used to lie in bed and recite Psalms by
heart to herself. She told her granddaughter to do the same.
Dr Zornberg says we should all choose some Psalms to
memorise. Then in times of grief or confusion, the act of reciting
them can become a source of comfort. They carry something
beyond conscious meaning. The passages give us a language to
say things we might be shy of expressing. They act like a blood
infusion: ‘Where I have been wobbling, I feel re-attached to
something secure.’
The Bible isn’t to everyone’s taste. We need to discover, collect
and draw upon our own sources of insight to give us the resilience
to get through each day. We’ve forgotten that we can alleviate pain
and anxiety using wisdom, eloquence and poetry.
What works will be different for each person. This book
has been compiled to remind myself, and persuade you, it’s a
worthwhile investment of your time.

24
Published by the UK Speechwriters’ Guild
www.ukspeechwritersguild.co.uk
Designed by Goldust Design
© 2022 Brian Jenner
ISBN 978-0-9563226-5-4
 There’s an English idiom: ‘stop and think’.
No one can think without stopping first.
HANNAH ARENDT

This book describes a discipline that was popular

in the Renaissance. A technique that helped
students become knowledgeable, spontaneous, witty,
articulate, creative and wise.

A speechwriter explains how to become more

aware of what you’re consuming, how to label and organise
things worth memorising and how to derive pleasure and
profit from taking time to think as you live your life.

It’s time to ‘engage brain’ and recover the

ancient habit of commonplacing.

ISBN 978-0-9563226-5-4

9 780956 322654