
The Benjamin Franklin Method: How to Be a Better Writer - _chu
http://marketmeditations.com/benjamin-franklin-learn-to-write/
======
liquidise
> _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._

~~~
jemfinch
As an exercise to the reader, name:

1\. He who works with his hands and heart, but not his head.

2\. He who works with his head and heart, but not his hands.

~~~
dredmorbius
Also: with his head but neither hands nor heart, and with heart but neither
hands nor head.

For completeness there's the null set.

~~~
domador
For these cases:

Who is someone who works with...

...his heart, but neither hands nor head: A blood donor.

...his head, but neither hands nor heart: A brain in a jar.

...neither hands, heart, nor head: A pointy-haired boss.

------
CuriouslyC
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
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-...](http://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/761/the-rules-of-writing)

------
panglott
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
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
For distraction-free writing, instead of a word processor I recommend
Draft[0].

[0][https://draftin.com/](https://draftin.com/)

~~~
drhayes9
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/)

~~~
Tallain
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
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.

------
john111
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
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)

------
lallysingh
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.

------
reubenswartz
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
> 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.

------
tpeo
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
>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?

~~~
clock_tower
B.R. Myers had a theory on that (in _A Reader 's Manifesto_, not _The Cleanest
Race_ ): a less literate people are more fond of word games. The common people
like to be awed by a skill they don't have; the elites, who can read, like to
show off their ability to read and write. Thus flowery prose before mass
education, and again at present.

However, I'm not sure if this is true or not; I'd have to look at how many
copies of various books sold in the 19th century US, which was not known for
its mass illiteracy. Knowing that the Ku Klux Klan got their burning crosses
from Sir Walter Scott, I'm suspecting that Myers' theory isn't as
comprehensive as it looks; Scott, at least, enjoyed a mass market. (And then
there's the steamers from London greeted with the question, "How is Little
Nell?")

The real dynamic might be elitism -- a desire to be reading text that the
populace wouldn't understand, if they encountered it. That would explain why
academic prose has gotten more opaque over time, regardless of what popular
fiction is doing -- and would explain why postmodern floweriness is mostly
confined to the sort of books that get reviewed in the New Yorker, the New
York Times, and the like.

~~~
throwanem
Writing from the 19th century United States tends to be relatively complex,
but grammatically so, rather than the sort of existentialist run-on nonsense
with which we're latterly so often abused. Here, as a reasonably
representative example, is the first paragraph of _The Last of the Mohicans_
[1]:

> It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the
> toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered before the
> adverse hosts could meet. A wide and apparently an impervious boundary of
> forests severed the possessions of the hostile provinces of France and
> England. The hardy colonist, and the trained European who fought at his
> side, frequently expended months in struggling against the rapids of the
> streams, or in effecting the rugged passes of the mountains, in quest of an
> opportunity to exhibit their courage in a more martial conflict. But,
> emulating the patience and self-denial of the practiced native warriors,
> they learned to overcome every difficulty; and it would seem that, in time,
> there was no recess of the woods so dark, nor any secret place so lovely,
> that it might claim exemption from the inroads of those who had pledged
> their blood to satiate their vengeance, or to uphold the cold and selfish
> policy of the distant monarchs of Europe.

This was an extremely popular novel in its day, in the literal sense of
"popular" \- by no means was it read exclusively among the elite, and indeed
the literary elite of the time tended to regard it despite occasional
equivocation as generally of good quality - although Twain, with his usual
inimitable style, quite rightly suggests [2] that Fenimore's work in general
should have been considerably less well regarded than it was. Nonetheless,
that it was so regarded, and so widely read, can hardly be brought into
question.

[1]
[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/940/940-h/940-h.htm](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/940/940-h/940-h.htm)

[2]
[http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/offense.html](http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/offense.html)

------
ruricolist
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
I imagine writing like this in the present century would read rather strange.
Is there a modern equivalent?

------
mwfogleman
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
Do you have a recommended starting point?

------
itsmemattchung
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
Is it possible for you to share your deck? I read Talent is Overrated and I
use Anki too.

~~~
itsmemattchung
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

------
jal278
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.

------
__jal
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.

------
skapadia
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.

------
0xdeadbeefbabe
How do you take notes on a sentence?

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

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

~~~
bgilroy26
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"

