3 Easy Exercises to Improve Your Writing Skills
By: Matt Lemanski
Tags: Writing Prompts, Writing Tips, Writing, Writing Life, Writers Block

1. Copy writing you enjoy (slowly and by hand).

Copying is wrong when your intention is to deceive people by putting your name on the work of someone else. That’s theft, specifically plagiarism.

But when your intention is to learn from good writing, copying can be a form of language meditation. And by copying, I don’t mean copy and paste. I mean copying by hand, with paper and pencil. Slowly. Thoughtfully.

When you copy, you begin to notice things about the rhythm, structure, and word selection in good writing. You’re not distracted by all the other stuff you tend to think about when writing. Are my spelling and grammar correct? Is my writing clear and concise? Are the details relevant and interesting?

They’re good questions to ask after you have written something, or if you’re already a skilled writer and want to become more efficient in your process.

For this exercise, find some writing you want to learn from, something you enjoyed reading. The sort of writing you wish you could write.

How to Copy a Text Mindfully

Copying can sometimes be difficult because it’s so easy. As with meditation, your mind may wander off, or push you to do this task as fast as possible. It wants something more interesting or more challenging to think about.

In such cases, it may help to make the task more difficult:

Copy the text by hand, rather than by keyboard.

Copy the text sentence by sentence, rather than word by word.

Read a full paragraph several times, then close the book (or hide the browser window) and try to reproduce the paragraph from memory.

Take brief notes about each sentence, then try reproducing the text based on your notes, a few days later.

Jumble up your list of notes, then try to reconstruct their original sequence and reproduce the text several weeks later.

These last two techniques were favored by one writer-statesman-scientist by the name of Benjamin Franklin. As he writes in his autobiography:

Portrait by Joseph Duplessis, 1778

‘About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator… I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try’d to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them… I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the paper. This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts. By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language…’

(Pretty good for someone who dropped out of school at the age of 10.)

A Brief Example

Below are two paragraphs from an essay by Rebecca Solnit entitled ‘Open Door’ from her book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

Rebecca Solnit by Sallie Dean Shatz

They’re actually the third and fourth paragraphs of the essay. The previous two explain the context of the open door: it’s part of the religious tradition of Passover, meant to allow the spirit of Elijah to enter the house and join the feast, at which point he will ‘answer all the unanswerable questions’.

Those first two paragraphs follow the conventional style of a personal essay. But in the third paragraph, the writing starts to get a little strange. It’s strange but I like it, so I decide to copy it down for further study:

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. Three years ago I was giving a workshop in the Rockies. A student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” I copied it down, and it has stayed with me since. The student made big transparent photographs of swimmers underwater and hung them from the ceiling with the light shining through them, so that to walk among them was to have the shadows of swimmers travel across your body in a space that itself came to seem aquatic and mysterious. The question she carried struck me as the basic tactical question in life. The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration — how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else? Certainly for artists of all stripes, the unknown, the idea or the form or the tale that has not yet arrived, is what must be found. It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophecies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it’s where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own. Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, “live always at the ‘edge of mystery’ — the boundary of the unknown.” But they transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea.

Analyze Your Errors

You may make some mistakes while copying. That’s OK. That’s good. You can learn some interesting things about writing by examining your errors.

For instance:

I left out the second comma in the second sentence: ‘That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from and where you will go.’ Technically, there’s nothing wrong with this mistake. It doesn’t change the meaning of the sentence or make it less clear for the reader. But it does change the feeling of the sentence, just a little. Solnit had a certain rhythm in mind when she wrote this sentence, a rhythm that feels like ocean waves and fits with the trope of water and dark seas. Removing the second comma disrupts this rhythm.

I accidentally wrote ‘A student came in with a quote’ instead of ‘A student came in bearing a quote’. This is a natural error, and perhaps ‘with’ is a better choice, since it’s more natural and conversational. ‘Bear’ is a rather uncommon verb these days and sounds a bit old-fashioned. In fact, it sounds kind of Biblical (three wise men came to baby Jesus ‘bearing’ gifts). So, on second thought, ‘bear’ may be a smart choice because it fits with the religious theme of the essay, and it gives the student’s presentation of this ancient quote a sense of majesty. There’s no majesty in my choice of ‘with’.

I made the mistake of writing ‘How will you go about finding that which is totally unknown to you?’— omitting the words ‘thing the nature of’ between ‘that’ and ‘which’. My sentence is still grammatically correct, and a bit less clunky, but it’s interesting to ask: Why did Solnit put such an awkwardly long quote in the middle of this elegant paragraph? Perhaps she did it for reasons of accuracy; perhaps those are the exact words she copied down. Nevertheless, these words give the question a stronger sense of precision, while also turning the question into a little grammatical puzzle that forces us to slow down in the middle of the paragraph, sort of like a speed bump. Solnit does not wish for us to race past this question, which will become the central idea unifying all the various tangents in her essay.

Those are just a few things I can learn about writing, by slowing down and studying specific examples of actual prose — rather than trying to absorb universal rules for generic situations.