If you want to start journaling, a commonplace book is a low-stakes entrypoint. Studies have shown that journaling can boost your mental health and help you process difficult emotions-even if you ...

I am too cool for Tumblr. Even so, it’s hard to resist the impulse to collect all the awesome stuff I come across in my Internet perambulations. Herein lies the dilemma: If I’m too cool for Tumblr, ...

Today everyone uses computers and cellphones to catalog thoughts and ideas but in the 19th-century, writers chose to take up the commonplace-book tradition by categorizing quotations and information ...

Jonathan Swift, who would in later life suffer from dementia, was keen on the importance of keeping a “commonplace book” in which a person might record insights, overheard bits, observations, excerpts ...

People once copied quotations longhand of writers they hoped to emulate. Can copying and pasting inspire us just as well? But the other kind of commonplace book was different. Its goal was to gather a ...

I keep a journal of quotes, lines from songs, poetry. Nothing is my original thought — but all of it struck me as meaningful when I wrote it down. By Charley Locke I’ve never been a journal person, ...

Studies have shown that journaling can boost your mental health and help you process difficult emotions—even if you don’t end up keeping what you’ve written down. But it can be a daunting task to ...