Keeping a Commonplace Book

Last night, I delivered my new presentation 'I Must Write That Down: A Commonplace Book' for Southbourne Literary Society. I'll write about that engagement in my next post but I'm going to use this one to talk about commonplace books and their extraordinary value for public speakers.

A commonplace book is where you copy anything that makes you think 'I must write that down before I forget it!' It may be something you read or hear or perhaps even some words of your own. Quotations, short verse or prose, observations, anecdotes, jokes, facts...anything that strikes you as inspiring, moving, amusing or fascinating - would your audience think the same if you included any of them in a future presentation?

They could be inscriptions from monuments dating back centuries or statements from interviewees in today's tabloid press but whatever they are, write them down because many of them will be useful for your public speaking - sometimes much sooner than you could have imagined.

Over many years of teaching workshops and classes in presentation skills, I have advised my students to keep commonplace books. It's something I do myself and it seemed a sensible idea to pass on but it was only when I began researching this new talk about commonplacing that I discovered that I had simply been carrying on a 2,500 year-old tradition! Teachers of rhetoric, dating back to Aristotle in Ancient Greece (and possibly even Protagoras a century before him) recommended that pupils should compile a repository of great ideas from others for use in their persuasive speaking!

Keeping a collection of this kind is immensely valuable for speakers; once you have committed an idea to your commonplace book, your subconscious mind often seems to go to work on natural ways for you to introduce it into your material at the earliest opportunity.

If you are uncertain what sort of material to include, have a look at some of the recently published commonplace books, such as Magnus Magnusson's 'Keeping My Words'. And watch out for the latest 'Christmas Cracker' edited by John Julius Norwich - these brilliant, popular collections have been published every year since 1970. They certainly aren't cheap for such slim volumes but they are excellent examples of the wide-ranging, memorable content of a good commonplace.

Public Speaking Tip #78: Start compiling a commonplace book of anything you come across which you could imagine yourself quoting, to good effect, in a speech. The chances are, you soon will be!