10 ms·

The Benjamin Franklin Method: How to Be a Better Writer

295 points by _chu 10y ago

panglott 10y ago
The problem with looking at how Ben Franklin developed his skills is that he had relatively fewer books to read and he had many fewer demands on his attention. For example, I read a piece a while ago discussing how Franklin learned Italian: he and some friends make a competition of memorizing an Italian grammar book. This is a terrible way to learn Italian, by modern thinking; because almost nobody is actually going to do it, and it won't actually get you speaking Italian. It's incredibly demanding for little reward. But if you know nobody who speaks Italian, have an Italian grammar book and immense dedication, and no TV or video games to fill the long, lonely, candlelit hours, I suppose you might as well? Similarly, hand-copying and re-writing Spectator articles multiple times in multiple forms is probably a (labor-intensive) way to improve your prose. But today we have word processors with copy and paste and blogs. Why not just write there and practice rewriting that?
- _chu 10y ago
  I don't think the main takeaway is about writing by hand. A word processor is fine too. What's important here is the act of "active writing" vs "passive writing". Franklin's method forces you to create writing (instead of just ingesting it) and then gives you specific feedback on whether you succeeded or failed (through comparison to the original). The dissect-chunking-integrate-feedback model works everywhere, and what fascinates me is that Franklin figured it out through his own experiments.
  - dasboth 10y ago
    For distraction-free writing, instead of a word processor I recommend Draft[0]. [0]https://draftin.com/ https://draftin.com/
    - dangerbird2 10y ago
      Pandoc is also a easy way to write markdown in a distraction-free editor and compile to docx, PDF, or latex
    - drhayes9 10y ago
      I dig Ulysses for the Mac[0]. Its distraction-free mode is very nice, but the organizational tools are there once you need to start stringing together larger pieces of text. I do wish someone would make a non-OSX version that was as nice. [0]https://ulyssesapp.com/ https://ulyssesapp.com/
      - crooked-v 10y ago
        Ulysses really bothers me because it's not "real" Markdown, so simple stuff like copy-pasting something with a link in it breaks.
      - Tallain 10y ago
        Have you heard of Scrivener? It's available for both OSX and PC, and I believe there's an iOS version, too. It's really wonderful. The organizational tools are just incredible, and are only as complicated and involved as you want them to be.
        drhayes9 10y ago
        Whoa, missed this. Sorry for the late reply. I have! I like Scrivener as well and it's very powerful but its "does everything" functionality has led to some bloat in the UI department. Ulysses seems more thoughtfully designed but doesn't have the same breadth of features.
    - tersiag 10y ago
      Draftin is a great. I often use the Hemingway writing mode (no backspace or delete). I make the browser full screen, switch off the spell checker, and just write.
    - throwawayReply 10y ago
  - panglott 10y ago
    My main point was about how Franklin's methods used a lot of tedious overwork. Hand-copying is an illustrative aspect of that, yes, but memorizing the text of an Italian grammar book is of similarly limited value even if you are using Anki and distration-free writing software to do it.
- egypturnash 10y ago
  I believe the idea behind "rewrite a well-written article in another form" is to focus your mind upon analyzing, breaking down, and emulating Good Writing. You'll be closely reading the work of someone better than you, rather than taking your own writing and trying to improve it without any real models of what would be better. Which would a novice programmer learn more from: blindly using whatever sort function their standard library provides; flailing around until they invent something like bubble sort and trying to optimize it; or reading about a few sort algorithms, picking one, and implementing it in their language of choice? (A pro, of course, would probably either use stdlib's sort, or know where to find a library of multiple sorts that someone spent days tweaking for amazing performance within various constraints.)
john111 10y ago
Benjamin Franklin's entire story is really inspirational. He certainly had work ethic in abundance. If you need an excuse to practice your writing, you may want to try National Novel Writing Month[1], which coincidentally, starts tomorrow. [1] http://nanowrimo.org http://nanowrimo.org
- dasboth 10y ago
  Slightly related, if you want to practise your text generation, there's National Novel Generation Month[0]. [0] https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2016 https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2016
CuriouslyC 10y ago
This article has some good information. Having worked hard to develop my writing process I suggest the following: 1. Writing poetry is good, but writing (and delivering) speeches is better. Nothing ferrets out difficult to follow, unnatural or confusing language better than getting up in front of a group and presenting it. Speeches also tend to be short-form, so they really force you to condense your ideas. 2. Writing is a multi-phase process, and each phase should be approached separately. Specifically: 2a.) The first step in good writing is to create a logical structure of your document - figure out what you want to talk about, then arrange the ideas you are going to cover into an ordered tree structure. Include questions you want to answer, any relevant research, and examples or analogies you want to cover. Personal opinions aside, Ayn Rand's The Art of Nonfiction is actually a very good guide to logical document structure. 2b.) The next step is to convert this structured document tree into prose. For this step, I suggest getting a pen and lined paper and getting away from the computer. Have a printed copy of your document tree to reference, and try to flesh it out without worrying too much about style. 2c.) Finally, transcribe your handwritten prose onto your word processor of choice, and edit for style. The basic tenets from The Element of Style are good. Favor short, direct, positive, active sentences. Focus on descriptive verbs and nouns rather than loading up on adverbs and adjectives. Try to trim unnecessary words. Beyond that, try to inject metaphor into your writing as much as possible. If you use a metaphor, try to stick with the same one for the entire paragraph. Use wordplay such as rhymes and alliterations to make important sentences more memorable.
- _chu 10y ago
  Thank you for the tip on speeches! I suspect that will help my writing sound more natural too. As for (2c), I've come up with a similar idea for doing multiple edits. I try to focus on a different writing "axiom" for each iteration. For example, I can cut out adverbs on the first run-through, add metaphor next, etc. StackExchange has a nice collection of writing rules here: http://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/761/the-rules-of-writing http://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/761/the-rules-of-...
- jonnathanson 10y ago
  Writing speeches is fantastic practice. More than anything, it teaches you to write the way you talk. That's generally a good thing. Most forms of writing education tell you to communicate clearly, as though you're speaking your words -- but they don't show you how. Writing a speech forces you to confront the way you sound. When great writers talk about writing "by ear," this is what they mean.
panglott 10y ago
He printed a local newspaper and invented the farmer's almanac, but is Benjamin Franklin actually a paragon of prose style?
- bgilroy26 10y ago
  They could have stamped a caveat just before the descriptions of the writing exercises: "If you're already better at writing than Benjamin Franklin, feel free to disregard"
trumpshairesy 10y ago
Great article. Perhaps you can share an example or two of what this process looks like. Will this method of breaking down, forgetting about it, then reconstructing work for improving my trolling? I certainly don't think Ben Franklin has anything to say on that. What say you?
- hobocopBAHZING 10y ago
  To troll or not to troll... that is the question... BAHZING!
  - sctb 10y ago
    Not, it seems. We've banned these accounts.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
tpeo 10y ago
These are good exercises, but you'd think that Franklin would have figured out some principles to writing beyond just trial and error. If there's one thing which can vastly improve writing, it's knowing how to write in simple manner. And by "simple", I mean "keeping your parse trees[0] short". I don't know how computationally intensive parsing is on an universal computer. But I know from experience that trying to read a text with long run-on sentences or with obnoxious grammatical features (like an overuse of subordinate clauses) can feel like pure suffering. And I think this advice largely emcompasses those recommendations like "keep it short", "be direct" or "always use a period, never a semicolon". Because if you keep away from baroque parse trees, at least you won't be a bad writer. In the popular sense, at least. If you're writing literature, you can do it freestyle. You can do a whole page of flow of consciousness, have footnotes on footnotes on footnotes, whatever. [0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parse_tree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parse_tree
- rudolf0 10y ago
  >But I know from experience that trying to read a text with long run-on sentences or with obnoxious grammatical features (like an overuse of subordinate clauses) can feel like pure suffering. It seems to me that until the 20th century, this was considered the "fashionable" and proper way to write. Most of the intellectuals of the time seemed to write this way. I wonder why?
  - ihaveahadron 10y ago
    sorry, it's because they were morons just saying/keeping it real keeping it real edit #2: to expand on that yes they were/are morons; but: the reason that those people who you are referring to wrote that way is this: writing on a piece of paper and writing using a computer are two different skill-sets in the brain. while these people had the ability to write using paper, when they would use a phone, a large percentage of their mental capacity was being used just in moving their fingers and typing on an electronic device, leaving them with only about 10% of their writing ability -- while they were using the device. see, while they were good at writing, they were not however, intelligent. see, if they were, they would have figured this out. dumbasses
jal278 10y ago
The mechanism of introducing an information bottleneck, e.g. by changing from prose to poetry and trying to recover the prose, seems similar to autoencoder techniques that are popular in machine learning.
liquidise 10y ago
> And the secret sauce is obsession. Correct. Above all else, passion and continued perseverance are the hallmarks of anyone truly successful at their trade. There is an excellent quote from Saint Francis of Assisi that, quite honestly, explains the software engineering field about as well as it did masonry in the 13th century (or writing in the 18th century). He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.
- happy-go-lucky 10y ago
  Now that quote really makes my day! Thank you.
- _chu 10y ago
  I climbed back out of bed just to upvote this. It's going in my little file of quotes that give me "the tingles". Thanks.
- tfnw 10y ago
  I think this is the way it is commonly thought of in society, I don't think this is a particularly good way to look at it though. I think the implied assumption in this framework, is that a laborer is less than a craftsman, who is in turn less than an artist. I see this as ripe for abuse by people who wish to project an elitist view on the world.
  - liquidise 10y ago
    I understand that criticism but i would urge people to focus on the contrast between working with just your hands vs head vs heart. That, and i think anyone who aspires to become an "artist" in a trade is on the right path.
    - tfnw 10y ago
      I appreciate the sentiment, but what if striving for "artistry" turns out to just cause a nuisance for the user? I think the problem here is that everyone experiences "art" differently, and what may be an impactful experience for some may just be irritating for others. Is it always better for someone to strive with their heart?
reubenswartz 10y ago
Franklin was full of interesting ideas (I think if Tim Ferriss could go back in time to interview one person, it should probably be Franklin) and I really like the idea of trying to reconstruct/emulate good writing. If you have the time, this is a great technique. For most of us, who need to write for work, we probably don't have (or think we have the time to do that). I've found it helpful to think of the story I'm trying to tell, as a story, with a beginning, middle, and end, and a hero(es), villian(s), etc. Then, everything is about the story, not about showing how smart you are by using a lot of big words, not about hiding complexity where it's a key part of the story, etc.
pcmaffey 10y ago
> If I'm a storyteller, it's because I listen Becoming good at anything, especially writing, is a practice in developing your attention. 1) Listen and Notice what's going on around you every day. Keep a daily journal of your observations. No one creates out of nothing. We only combine details we've seen elsewhere. 2) Focus on the smallest possible detail that still captures the meaning of the whole. 3) Do this every day. Create a practice of awareness. Life is full of meaning. We just have to learn to see it.
lallysingh 10y ago
Many of these methods could be adapted to cleaning up your programming-writing style. E.g: Take existing good code written by others, make notes on what it does, then write it yourself and compare to the original.
itsmemattchung 10y ago
I came across Franklin's method years go while reading "Talent is Overrated" and modified his strategy by coupling Anki, a digital SRS—spaced repetition system—with books and articles by my favorite authors. It goes like this: read a sentence, rewrite it in my own words on one side of the "card", copy down the original sentence on the other side of the card. Practice. Rinse and repeat.
- pw9 10y ago
  Is it possible for you to share your deck? I read Talent is Overrated and I use Anki too.
  - itsmemattchung 10y ago
    My deck is highly tailored to authors that I aspire to emulate, however, shoot me an e-mail and send you my deck. matt@itsmemattchung.com
mwfogleman 10y ago
If you're interested in doing these techniques practically, Arthur Whimbey's materials on writing could be very helpful. They give you a more systematic and practical approach than is presented here.
- mcshaner1 10y ago
  Do you have a recommended starting point?
__jal 10y ago
I decided not to read this after the page scrolled back to the top twice while I was reading, and then threw a popup demanding an email address when I dared move the mouse. That's when I closed the window. I've had about enough bullshit "engagement" today, and marketmedications.com won't be getting visits from me until I forget how rude they are. I'm pretty sure that if Ben Franklin were writing today, he'd want to publish somewhere that wasn't so annoying it chased readers away.
0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
How do you take notes on a sentence?
- bgilroy26 10y ago
  I took it to mean "put the sentence in your own words in a shorter way"
ruricolist 10y ago
For those not familiar with 18th century literature, a little context might be in order. The Spectator that Franklin made a model of is no relation of the modern magazine. This Spectator was an "essay series", a peculiarly 18th century genre, something like an editorial column without a magazine -- or a blog, for that matter. At the time, the Spectator essays were considered the high-water mark of good style and clear expression in English. You can read them for yourself on Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12030 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12030
- projektir 10y ago
  I imagine writing like this in the present century would read rather strange. Is there a modern equivalent?
skapadia 10y ago
If you like this article, I highly recommend checking out https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/ https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/. It drops a lot of wisdom around making better decisions, recognizing and working towards reducing the effect of cognitive biases, and getting to know our rational and irrational selves better.

295 points by _chu 10y ago

The problem with looking at how Ben Franklin developed his skills is that he had relatively fewer books to read and he had many fewer demands on his attention. For example, I read a piece a while ago discussing how Franklin learned Italian: he and some friends make a competition of memorizing an Italian grammar book. This is a terrible way to learn Italian, by modern thinking; because almost nobody is actually going to do it, and it won't actually get you speaking Italian. It's incredibly demanding for little reward. But if you know nobody who speaks Italian, have an Italian grammar book and immense dedication, and no TV or video games to fill the long, lonely, candlelit hours, I suppose you might as well? Similarly, hand-copying and re-writing Spectator articles multiple times in multiple forms is probably a (labor-intensive) way to improve your prose. But today we have word processors with copy and paste and blogs. Why not just write there and practice rewriting that?

_chu 10y ago
I don't think the main takeaway is about writing by hand. A word processor is fine too. What's important here is the act of "active writing" vs "passive writing". Franklin's method forces you to create writing (instead of just ingesting it) and then gives you specific feedback on whether you succeeded or failed (through comparison to the original). The dissect-chunking-integrate-feedback model works everywhere, and what fascinates me is that Franklin figured it out through his own experiments.
- dasboth 10y ago
  For distraction-free writing, instead of a word processor I recommend Draft[0]. [0]https://draftin.com/ https://draftin.com/
  - dangerbird2 10y ago
    Pandoc is also a easy way to write markdown in a distraction-free editor and compile to docx, PDF, or latex
  - drhayes9 10y ago
    I dig Ulysses for the Mac[0]. Its distraction-free mode is very nice, but the organizational tools are there once you need to start stringing together larger pieces of text. I do wish someone would make a non-OSX version that was as nice. [0]https://ulyssesapp.com/ https://ulyssesapp.com/
    - crooked-v 10y ago
      Ulysses really bothers me because it's not "real" Markdown, so simple stuff like copy-pasting something with a link in it breaks.
    - Tallain 10y ago
      Have you heard of Scrivener? It's available for both OSX and PC, and I believe there's an iOS version, too. It's really wonderful. The organizational tools are just incredible, and are only as complicated and involved as you want them to be.
      - drhayes9 10y ago
        Whoa, missed this. Sorry for the late reply. I have! I like Scrivener as well and it's very powerful but its "does everything" functionality has led to some bloat in the UI department. Ulysses seems more thoughtfully designed but doesn't have the same breadth of features.
  - tersiag 10y ago
    Draftin is a great. I often use the Hemingway writing mode (no backspace or delete). I make the browser full screen, switch off the spell checker, and just write.
  - throwawayReply 10y ago
- panglott 10y ago
  My main point was about how Franklin's methods used a lot of tedious overwork. Hand-copying is an illustrative aspect of that, yes, but memorizing the text of an Italian grammar book is of similarly limited value even if you are using Anki and distration-free writing software to do it.
egypturnash 10y ago
I believe the idea behind "rewrite a well-written article in another form" is to focus your mind upon analyzing, breaking down, and emulating Good Writing. You'll be closely reading the work of someone better than you, rather than taking your own writing and trying to improve it without any real models of what would be better. Which would a novice programmer learn more from: blindly using whatever sort function their standard library provides; flailing around until they invent something like bubble sort and trying to optimize it; or reading about a few sort algorithms, picking one, and implementing it in their language of choice? (A pro, of course, would probably either use stdlib's sort, or know where to find a library of multiple sorts that someone spent days tweaking for amazing performance within various constraints.)

john111 10y ago

Benjamin Franklin's entire story is really inspirational. He certainly had work ethic in abundance. If you need an excuse to practice your writing, you may want to try National Novel Writing Month[1], which coincidentally, starts tomorrow. [1] http://nanowrimo.org http://nanowrimo.org

dasboth 10y ago
Slightly related, if you want to practise your text generation, there's National Novel Generation Month[0]. [0] https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2016 https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2016

CuriouslyC 10y ago

This article has some good information. Having worked hard to develop my writing process I suggest the following: 1. Writing poetry is good, but writing (and delivering) speeches is better. Nothing ferrets out difficult to follow, unnatural or confusing language better than getting up in front of a group and presenting it. Speeches also tend to be short-form, so they really force you to condense your ideas. 2. Writing is a multi-phase process, and each phase should be approached separately. Specifically: 2a.) The first step in good writing is to create a logical structure of your document - figure out what you want to talk about, then arrange the ideas you are going to cover into an ordered tree structure. Include questions you want to answer, any relevant research, and examples or analogies you want to cover. Personal opinions aside, Ayn Rand's The Art of Nonfiction is actually a very good guide to logical document structure. 2b.) The next step is to convert this structured document tree into prose. For this step, I suggest getting a pen and lined paper and getting away from the computer. Have a printed copy of your document tree to reference, and try to flesh it out without worrying too much about style. 2c.) Finally, transcribe your handwritten prose onto your word processor of choice, and edit for style. The basic tenets from The Element of Style are good. Favor short, direct, positive, active sentences. Focus on descriptive verbs and nouns rather than loading up on adverbs and adjectives. Try to trim unnecessary words. Beyond that, try to inject metaphor into your writing as much as possible. If you use a metaphor, try to stick with the same one for the entire paragraph. Use wordplay such as rhymes and alliterations to make important sentences more memorable.

_chu 10y ago
Thank you for the tip on speeches! I suspect that will help my writing sound more natural too. As for (2c), I've come up with a similar idea for doing multiple edits. I try to focus on a different writing "axiom" for each iteration. For example, I can cut out adverbs on the first run-through, add metaphor next, etc. StackExchange has a nice collection of writing rules here: http://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/761/the-rules-of-writing http://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/761/the-rules-of-...
jonnathanson 10y ago
Writing speeches is fantastic practice. More than anything, it teaches you to write the way you talk. That's generally a good thing. Most forms of writing education tell you to communicate clearly, as though you're speaking your words -- but they don't show you how. Writing a speech forces you to confront the way you sound. When great writers talk about writing "by ear," this is what they mean.

panglott 10y ago

He printed a local newspaper and invented the farmer's almanac, but is Benjamin Franklin actually a paragon of prose style?

bgilroy26 10y ago
They could have stamped a caveat just before the descriptions of the writing exercises: "If you're already better at writing than Benjamin Franklin, feel free to disregard"

trumpshairesy 10y ago

Great article. Perhaps you can share an example or two of what this process looks like. Will this method of breaking down, forgetting about it, then reconstructing work for improving my trolling? I certainly don't think Ben Franklin has anything to say on that. What say you?

hobocopBAHZING 10y ago
To troll or not to troll... that is the question... BAHZING!
- sctb 10y ago
  Not, it seems. We've banned these accounts.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

tpeo 10y ago

These are good exercises, but you'd think that Franklin would have figured out some principles to writing beyond just trial and error. If there's one thing which can vastly improve writing, it's knowing how to write in simple manner. And by "simple", I mean "keeping your parse trees[0] short". I don't know how computationally intensive parsing is on an universal computer. But I know from experience that trying to read a text with long run-on sentences or with obnoxious grammatical features (like an overuse of subordinate clauses) can feel like pure suffering. And I think this advice largely emcompasses those recommendations like "keep it short", "be direct" or "always use a period, never a semicolon". Because if you keep away from baroque parse trees, at least you won't be a bad writer. In the popular sense, at least. If you're writing literature, you can do it freestyle. You can do a whole page of flow of consciousness, have footnotes on footnotes on footnotes, whatever. [0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parse_tree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parse_tree

rudolf0 10y ago
>But I know from experience that trying to read a text with long run-on sentences or with obnoxious grammatical features (like an overuse of subordinate clauses) can feel like pure suffering. It seems to me that until the 20th century, this was considered the "fashionable" and proper way to write. Most of the intellectuals of the time seemed to write this way. I wonder why?
- ihaveahadron 10y ago
  sorry, it's because they were morons just saying/keeping it real keeping it real edit #2: to expand on that yes they were/are morons; but: the reason that those people who you are referring to wrote that way is this: writing on a piece of paper and writing using a computer are two different skill-sets in the brain. while these people had the ability to write using paper, when they would use a phone, a large percentage of their mental capacity was being used just in moving their fingers and typing on an electronic device, leaving them with only about 10% of their writing ability -- while they were using the device. see, while they were good at writing, they were not however, intelligent. see, if they were, they would have figured this out. dumbasses

jal278 10y ago

The mechanism of introducing an information bottleneck, e.g. by changing from prose to poetry and trying to recover the prose, seems similar to autoencoder techniques that are popular in machine learning.

liquidise 10y ago

> And the secret sauce is obsession. Correct. Above all else, passion and continued perseverance are the hallmarks of anyone truly successful at their trade. There is an excellent quote from Saint Francis of Assisi that, quite honestly, explains the software engineering field about as well as it did masonry in the 13th century (or writing in the 18th century). He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.

happy-go-lucky 10y ago
Now that quote really makes my day! Thank you.
_chu 10y ago
I climbed back out of bed just to upvote this. It's going in my little file of quotes that give me "the tingles". Thanks.
tfnw 10y ago
I think this is the way it is commonly thought of in society, I don't think this is a particularly good way to look at it though. I think the implied assumption in this framework, is that a laborer is less than a craftsman, who is in turn less than an artist. I see this as ripe for abuse by people who wish to project an elitist view on the world.
- liquidise 10y ago
  I understand that criticism but i would urge people to focus on the contrast between working with just your hands vs head vs heart. That, and i think anyone who aspires to become an "artist" in a trade is on the right path.
  - tfnw 10y ago
    I appreciate the sentiment, but what if striving for "artistry" turns out to just cause a nuisance for the user? I think the problem here is that everyone experiences "art" differently, and what may be an impactful experience for some may just be irritating for others. Is it always better for someone to strive with their heart?

reubenswartz 10y ago

Franklin was full of interesting ideas (I think if Tim Ferriss could go back in time to interview one person, it should probably be Franklin) and I really like the idea of trying to reconstruct/emulate good writing. If you have the time, this is a great technique. For most of us, who need to write for work, we probably don't have (or think we have the time to do that). I've found it helpful to think of the story I'm trying to tell, as a story, with a beginning, middle, and end, and a hero(es), villian(s), etc. Then, everything is about the story, not about showing how smart you are by using a lot of big words, not about hiding complexity where it's a key part of the story, etc.

pcmaffey 10y ago

> If I'm a storyteller, it's because I listen Becoming good at anything, especially writing, is a practice in developing your attention. 1) Listen and Notice what's going on around you every day. Keep a daily journal of your observations. No one creates out of nothing. We only combine details we've seen elsewhere. 2) Focus on the smallest possible detail that still captures the meaning of the whole. 3) Do this every day. Create a practice of awareness. Life is full of meaning. We just have to learn to see it.

lallysingh 10y ago

Many of these methods could be adapted to cleaning up your programming-writing style. E.g: Take existing good code written by others, make notes on what it does, then write it yourself and compare to the original.

itsmemattchung 10y ago

I came across Franklin's method years go while reading "Talent is Overrated" and modified his strategy by coupling Anki, a digital SRS—spaced repetition system—with books and articles by my favorite authors. It goes like this: read a sentence, rewrite it in my own words on one side of the "card", copy down the original sentence on the other side of the card. Practice. Rinse and repeat.

pw9 10y ago
Is it possible for you to share your deck? I read Talent is Overrated and I use Anki too.
- itsmemattchung 10y ago
  My deck is highly tailored to authors that I aspire to emulate, however, shoot me an e-mail and send you my deck. matt@itsmemattchung.com

mwfogleman 10y ago

If you're interested in doing these techniques practically, Arthur Whimbey's materials on writing could be very helpful. They give you a more systematic and practical approach than is presented here.

mcshaner1 10y ago
Do you have a recommended starting point?

__jal 10y ago

I decided not to read this after the page scrolled back to the top twice while I was reading, and then threw a popup demanding an email address when I dared move the mouse. That's when I closed the window. I've had about enough bullshit "engagement" today, and marketmedications.com won't be getting visits from me until I forget how rude they are. I'm pretty sure that if Ben Franklin were writing today, he'd want to publish somewhere that wasn't so annoying it chased readers away.

0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago

How do you take notes on a sentence?

bgilroy26 10y ago
I took it to mean "put the sentence in your own words in a shorter way"

ruricolist 10y ago

For those not familiar with 18th century literature, a little context might be in order. The Spectator that Franklin made a model of is no relation of the modern magazine. This Spectator was an "essay series", a peculiarly 18th century genre, something like an editorial column without a magazine -- or a blog, for that matter. At the time, the Spectator essays were considered the high-water mark of good style and clear expression in English. You can read them for yourself on Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12030 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12030

projektir 10y ago
I imagine writing like this in the present century would read rather strange. Is there a modern equivalent?

skapadia 10y ago

If you like this article, I highly recommend checking out https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/ https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/. It drops a lot of wisdom around making better decisions, recognizing and working towards reducing the effect of cognitive biases, and getting to know our rational and irrational selves better.