I thought about starting this column by making the case that you should still learn to write even in the age of AI. But I’ll leave it to you to read the million and one articles out there from writing teachers, neuroscientists, CEOs, literary icons, and even me arguing that, if you want to actually be able to think well, you still need to learn to write well.
This column is for those who are already convinced that the sometimes maddening work of transmuting thoughts in your head to words on the page makes you a smarter, wiser worker and citizen. (Not necessarily in that order.) Those who are ready to move on to the next important question: Given all that, what’s the best way to learn to write well?
You can sign up for courses and coaching, of course. But if you want to DIY your way to greater self-knowledge, a stronger brain, and an increasingly rare and valuable skill, then the only teacher you really need is Ben Franklin.
His approach is old. And it’s difficult — there’s no way to sugarcoat that following Franklin’s method takes some dedication. But it also transformed the Founding Father into someone who could craft sentences that are still read more than 200 years later. It is almost guaranteed to turn you into a much better writer too.
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How Ben Franklin transformed himself into a great writer
Ben Franklin was clearly brilliant. But he wasn’t particularly well educated — he finished formal schooling at the age of 10. Which meant as a young man he wasn’t a skilled writer. In an episode of early American parental shaming many students will instantly recognize, his father criticized him for being “far short in elegance and expression, method and perspicuity.”
Franklin wasn’t the type of guy to take being accused of a lack of perspicuity (a.k.a. “being clear and easy to understand”) lying down. In his autobiography, he lays out the course of self-study he undertook to improve his writing. It consisted of five parts.
- Read his favorite local magazine and select an article he admired
- Take brief notes on the contents of the article
- Put them away until he’d mostly forgotten what he read
- Try to recreate the article based on his notes
- Compare his attempt with the original, noting areas for improvement
Once he felt he had gained a measure of skill from this exercise, he made life even more difficult for himself. He tried to express the same ideas as the article but this time in the form of a poem. The stricter confines of a poetical structure, he felt, pushed him to discover and use a richer vocabulary to fit the rhyme scheme or meter.