The Spectator Method
With one odd volume of essays, a teenage printer's apprentice built himself a complete writing school: note, wait, rebuild, compare, correct.
Franklin found a stray third volume of the Spectator, “read it over and over,” and “thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it.” No teacher was available, so 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, without looking at the book, try'd to compleat the papers again” — then compared his version with the original, “discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.”
He kept upgrading the exercise. Short of vocabulary, he turned the tales into verse and back — rhyme and meter forcing him to hunt synonyms. Then he jumbled his hints into confusion and re-ordered them weeks later, “to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts.”
Sometimes, comparing, he fancied he had slightly improved the original — and that small pleasure “encouraged me to think I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely ambitious.” The exercises ran at night, before work, and on Sundays.
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.”