The Spectator Method
With one odd volume of essays, a teenage printer's apprentice built himself a writing school: note, wait, rebuild, compare, correct.
Franklin found a stray third volume of the Spectator and “thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it.” With no teacher available, he invented the drill.
He took the papers, “making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then… try'd to compleat the papers again” — then compared with the original and corrected his faults.
Short of vocabulary, he turned tales into verse and back. Then he jumbled the hints and re-ordered them weeks later, “to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts.”
Run the Spectator drill
Hint, then let it cool
Take a piece of writing you admire and reduce each sentence to a short hint of its point. Set the hints aside for a few days — the gap is what makes the rebuild a real test.
Rebuild without looking
From your hints alone, write the piece back out at full length in your own best words. Don't peek — struggle is the instruction.
- Variant: shuffle the hints and restore the order first — that trains structure
Compare and correct
Set your version beside the original, line by line. Every difference is a lesson: sometimes your fault, occasionally your improvement. Fix the faults; keep the improvements.
“I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely ambitious.”
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