Writing commonplace book entries by hand

Its goal was to gather a collection of the wisest statements, usually of the ancients, for future meditation. And here the key thing was to write the words in your own hand – by this means, by laboriously and carefully copying out the insights of people smarter than you, you could absorb and internalize their wisdom. Call it osmosis-by-handwriting.

from Alan Jacobs for The Atlantic, ‘Commonplace Books’: The Tumblrs of an Earlier Era