On Keeping a Commonplace Book

Every few months I copy out the sentences I want to remember from whatever I’ve been reading. Not highlights — actual handwriting, in a single notebook, in ink.

It is a slow practice and almost completely useless in the productivity sense. It is also one of the only practices I’ve kept for a decade.

The point, I think, is not the notebook. The point is that the act of writing a sentence by hand forces you to read it twice — once to choose it, and once to make it.