How Ben Learned to Write

It only took nine weeks, but I finally finished H.W. Brands' The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin. I have knocked off books twice the length in half the time. But this one I took a teaspoon at a time because there's just too much detail to digest. Nine weeks is too long though. Sprinting to the end I came on a passing mention, on page 689, of Franklin's learning to write by imitating English essayist Richard Steele. Always curious about how people learn to write, I flipped to the end notes and there was no source listed (Yes, I'm a footnote junkie). Annoyance turned to embarrassment -- even though no one was looking -- when I found in my notes "p. 24-Spectator exercises." So here's Brands' description of how this Boston teenager taught himself to write.

"He had recently encountered an early issue of the Spectator, the London journal soon to be famous for the essays of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Ben read this number in front to back, then back to front and all over again. Entranced by the authors' ease of exposition, he adopted the Spectator's style as a model for his own. He devised elaborate exercises to absorb all that underlay its phrases. He would read passages and try to recapitulate them from memory. On the reasoning that poetry demands a larger vocabulary than prose -- and given the meaning must also fit the pattern of rhyme and meter -- he reworked the Spectator essays into verse, and subsequently back into prose again. He took notes on the essays, then deliberately scrambled the notes before attempting to reconstruct the original order, the better to appreciate the art of rhetorical organization."

By the middle of the 20th century, imitation as a means of learning how to write had fallen out of favor. But all but the most innovative teachers were still conflicted about it. To hedge their bets they assigned "readers" from which students were supposed to learn something, exactly what was unclear. Students of course sniffed out this ambivalence and did their best to ignore the readers. Perhaps both teachers and students would have been better off with a clear shot at what they were going to do and how they were going to do it.

On the other hand, Franklin taught himself, without the interference of teachers. Maybe he was on to something.