Writing helps you to get to know yourself - but also to get your thoughts together:
Why Writing Helps You Understand Yourself | by Bill Widmer | Medium
One way to do some regular writing is to create a 'commonplace book':
Commonplace books are private collections of information, but they are not diaries or travelogues.
They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas.
In other words, you are not writing out your own created words, but someone else's:
A commonplace book is a central resource or depository for ideas, quotes, anecdotes, observations and information you come across during your life and didactic pursuits. The purpose of the book is to record and organize these gems for later use in your life, in your business, in your writing, speaking or whatever it is that you do.
Some of the greatest men and women in history have kept these books. Marcus Aurelius kept one–which more or less became the Meditations. Petrarch kept one. Montaigne, who invented the essay, kept a handwritten compilation of sayings, maxims and quotations from literature and history that he felt were important. His earliest essays were little more than compilations of these thoughts. Thomas Jefferson kept one. Napoleon kept one. HL Mencken, who did so much for the English language, as his biographer put it, “methodically filled notebooks with incidents, recording straps of dialog and slang” and favorite bits from newspaper columns he liked. Bill Gates keeps one.
Not only did all these famous and great individuals do it. But so have common people throughout history. Our true understanding of the Civil War, for example, is a result of the spread of cheap diaries and notebooks that soldiers could record their thoughts in. Art of Manliness recently did an amazing post about the history of pocket notebooks. Some people have gone as far as to claim that Pinterest is a modern iteration of the commonplace book.
How And Why To Keep A “Commonplace Book” - RyanHoliday.net
This programme looks at the 'commonplace book' - where we would write down things we heard or read or thought of during the day - where you focus on the language as well as the content:
The Death of Nuance - Regaining Nuance - BBC Sounds
This can be a great way to improve your English: 'copying' is learning:
Teaching English composition with early modern-style “commonplace books” | Vade Mecum
The Commonplace Book Assignment /
100+ COMMONPLACE BOOK ideas | commonplace book, journal writing, sketch book
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