Welcome to the UM First-Year Writing Program’s Commonplace Book blog site.  The Commonplace Book is a semester-long project that is worth 15% of the final grade and serves as the final exam for the course.

The commonplace book project offers students:

1. the space to collect the ideas and artifacts they consider to be most valuable to their learning
2. the opportunity to reflect on what they have collected in order to make sense of their own learning
3. the opportunity to devise a structure for articulating that learning as they begin to generate their vision of what a college education means.

The commonplace book incorporates a series of four composing practices:

1. daily reflection through which the student identifies and collects the most important one or two concepts/strategies/practices from each class session (1-2 minutes per class)
2. weekly reflection through which the student collects and reflects on the most important readings (i.e., a passage from an NYT article, an assignment from another class, a message on social media, a letter from a family member), every week (outside of class)
3. unit reflections (one class period extending into homework if necessary)
4.  end-of-semester review, commenting, tagging, redesign, and extended final post explaining of tagging through which the student develops categories to articulate and systematize major concepts and strategies that are the building blocks of his/her vision of a college education (two weeks at the end of the semester)