Jack Kerouac followed the general advice of Mortimer J. Adler to write notes into the endpapers of his books as evidenced by the endpapers of Volume IV of the 7th Year Course of The Great Books Foundation series with which Adler was closely associated.

Margins in books and on paper are blank spaces for "dark ideas" asking to be filled in while "reading with a pen in hand" so that the reader can have a conversation with the text.

Link to https://hypothes.is/a/GvRApkN3Ee6LbBPqqX-A5Q on dark ideas

Benjamin Franklin letter to Miss Stevenson, Wanstead. Craven-street, May 16, 1760.

Franklin doesn't use the word commonplace book here, but is actively recommending the creation and use of one. He's also encouraging the practice of annotation, though in commonplace form rather than within the book itself.

love "raucous conversation"!

also:

Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it—which comes to the same thing—is by writing in it. —Adler, Mortimer J., and Charles Van Doren. How to Read a Book. Revised and Updated edition. 1940. Reprint, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972.

They also suggest that due to the relative low cost of books, it's easier to justify writing in them, though they carve out an exception for the barbarism of scribbling in library books.

Barbara Tuchman recommended using the smallest sized index cards possible to force one only to "extract the strictly relevant" because copying by hand can be both "a chore and a bore".

In the same address in 1963, she encourages "distill[ing] from the very beginning, to pass the material through the grinder of one's own mind, so to speak." This practice is similar to modern day pedagogues who encourage this practice, but with the benefit of psychology research to back up the practice.

This advice is two-fold in terms of filtering out the useless material for an author, but the grinder metaphor indicates placing multiple types of material in to to a processor to see what new combinations of products come out the other end. This touches more subtly on the idea of combinatorial creativity encouraged by Raymond Llull, Matt Ridley, et al. or the serendipity described by Niklas Luhmann and others.

When did the writing for understanding idea begin within the tradition? Was it through experience in part and then underlined with psychology research? Visit Ahrens' references on this for particular papers to read.

Link to modality shift research.

This list is a great framework for showing students what they don't know, so they can actively work and practice at becoming better at their craft.

I feel like actively annotating and "reading with a pen in hand" has been a great way to practice many of these points. Questioning texts, marking open problems, etc. goes a long way toward practicing these methods.

original source?

"Mere reading" today consists of a lot of scrolling through never-ending social media posts on mobile phones....