3 ms·
My advice is to learn as we humans learn best, through imitation. Find some speakers that you admire, with online content, or videos. Next take a ~5 minute seg
by ramblerman 8y ago
My advice is to learn as we humans learn best, through imitation.
Find some speakers that you admire, with online content, or videos. Next take a ~5 minute segment, which has a start and finish.
Turn off the video and formulate the same argument on your own, either in writing, or by recording yourself, depending on your goals. Now go back and compare to the original.
Whilst tedious this will highlight your own shortcomings, and the genius of those you are emulating far quicker than any passive approach, imo.
- currymj 8y agothis is similar to an exercise David Foster Wallace would do — take a longish piece of prose, read it once, then try to replicate it exactly without looking. Assuming it’s long enough that you can’t hold it in working memory, you’ll end up with something that shows you the difference between your own instinctive writing style and whatever you are copying.
- tw1010 8y agoWhere did you read that? (I'm curious.) Ben Franklin did basically the same thing.
- godelmachine 8y agoBen Franklin imitated John Bunyan from Pilgrim's Progress if I am not wrong.
- currymj 8y agoi didn't remember, but searching around it looks like it was something he mentioned in an interview with Bryan A. Garner.
- fenomas 8y agoSide note, but this is quite similar to how Raymond Chandler taught himself to write (around age 40 IIRC). He'd take a short story he liked, make a detailed outline of the plot, then write a story from the outline and compare it to the original.