Make Your Own Dictionary

"Now I think that every student could make his own dictionary of usage. He could keep a notebook in which to record, in alphabetical order, such points of usage as he might find of particular interest to him. Such a book would serve him as a constant companion to composition, though many things in it might seem quite dull or useless to others.

"And I think that every student could make his dictionary of usage as large as the sum total of the books he reads. I mean that he might make a usage index, so to speak, to those books. For a particular point he would have to record only the book, the page, and the line concerned. He would some day be able to point to his library and say: 'This is my dictionary of English usage'. What a great work!"

Such a dictionary might prove of greater use to you than any book of grammar or idiom ever published. By the way, even if the whole or parts of the dictionary should be lost or destroyed before you had made any use of them, you would have profited by the very process of making them; for it must have helped to fix many valuable points in your memory.