copywork.htm

Notes on Copywork

Copywork, as it’s called, used to be the standard method by which students learned to write, and it is the “secret” to how many of history’s greatest writers mastered the craft.

Notes

n fact this is how every artist in every creative discipline works. Musicians develop vocabulary by learning other people’s work, painters develop technique by copying the masters.

Once you understand how the greats do it, you are then able to take a mix of their techniques and principles and blend them into your own style.

A very good way to learn how to craft words - in fact the only way really, even if you never realised you were doing it.

Authors

Concise writing

• Paul Graham
• Stratechery
• Wait but Why
• Scott Alexander

Non-fiction

• Hemingway - Faraway to Arms
• Milan Kundera - Laughter and Forgetting

Copywork Exercise

Instead of transcribing essays word for word, Franklin’s copywork exercise looked like this

1. Read essay.
2. Make notes for each sentence that he read and set it aside.
3. Look at notes and try to replicate essay in his own words (he’d sometimes jumble up his notes to make the exercise even more difficult).
4. Compare his version to the original.
5. Revise and improve his version.