Why Franklin started
Franklin was apprenticed to his older brother James, a Boston printer, when he was twelve. In his spare time he argued by letter with a friend, John Collins, about whether women should be educated. His father found the letters and read them. Franklin writes that his father judged that, though he spelled and punctuated better than Collins (thanks to the printing house), he “fell far short in elegance of expression, in method and in perspicuity.” Franklin agreed, and “determined to endeavor at improvement.”
About this time he came across an odd volume of The Spectator, the daily essay paper written mainly by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in 1711 and 1712. It was the third volume. “I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it.”
The Spectator exercise, in Franklin's words
Franklin's description is short and exact. He took some of the essays 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.” He expressed each hint at length, “as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand.”
Then came the step that makes the exercise work: “Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.”
The method has three parts. Notes force you to identify what each sentence is doing. The delay of a few days means you cannot rely on memorized wording, so you have to find your own. The comparison shows you, sentence by sentence, where a better writer made a better choice.
Variation one: prose into verse and back
Comparing his versions with Addison's showed Franklin a particular weakness: “I found I wanted a stock of words, or a readiness in recollecting and using them.” He reasoned that writing verse would have fixed this, because meter and rhyme constantly demand words of the same meaning but different length or sound.
So he made verse do the work: “Therefore I took some of the tales and turned them into verse; and, after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again.” The verse step forced him to search for synonyms. The return to prose forced him to choose among them.
Variation two: jumbled notes
The second variation trained structure rather than vocabulary. “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.”
This is an exercise in outlining. Given a pile of points, you must decide which comes first and why, and then you can see how Addison actually ordered them.
What it did for him
Franklin is modest about the results. Comparing his work with the original, he “discovered many faults and amended them,” but sometimes had “the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method of the language.” That encouraged him to think he might become “a tolerable English writer.”
He fitted the practice around a full working day: “My time for these exercises and for reading was at night, after work or before it began in the morning, or on Sundays.”
Soon afterwards he tested himself in public. In 1722, at sixteen, he slipped anonymous essays under the door of his brother's newspaper, the New-England Courant. Written as the letters of a widow called Silence Dogood, they were printed, and his brother's literary friends approved of them without knowing the author.
How to do Franklin's method today
You need one short, well-written essay, a notebook or file, and about four sessions of 20 to 30 minutes spread over a week. Copywork hosts The Spectator, No. 10, Addison's essay of March 12, 1711, which sets out what the paper was for. It is not necessarily one of the papers Franklin used (he had the third volume), but it is the same writer, the same paper and the same style, and it is short enough for this exercise.
- Session 1: Retype the essay exactly on Copywork. Copying first means you have attended to every sentence once before you try to rebuild them.
- Session 1, continued: Write one short note per sentence, a few words that capture what the sentence says, not how. For example: “papers sell 3,000 a day; maybe 60,000 readers.” Do this for the first four or five paragraphs.
- Wait two to four days. Do not reread the essay.
- Session 2: Using only your notes, write each sentence out in full. Aim for the same length and fullness as the original. Use whatever words come; do not try to remember Addison's.
- Session 3: Put your version beside the original. Go sentence by sentence and mark every place where his is better: a sharper word, a better order, a neater link between sentences. Write down two or three patterns you notice.
- Session 4, optional verse step: Turn one paragraph into rough rhymed or metered lines. A week later, turn the verse back into prose without looking at the original, then compare again.
- Session 4, optional order step: Write your notes for a whole essay on separate cards or lines, shuffle them, and wait a week. Put them in the best order you can, write the essay, and compare your order with the writer's.
Tips for getting the most from it
- Choose prose a little better than yours, not wildly beyond it. Franklin chose a paper he admired and could follow.
- Keep notes brief. If your notes contain the original phrasing, you are memorizing, not writing.
- Compare honestly. The comparison is where the learning happens, so take as long on it as on the rewriting.
- Use modern models too. The same exercise works with any essay you admire. Copywork's paths group essays by style, from plain founder prose to the classic essayists.
- Repeat it. Franklin did this with several papers over time, not once.
Questions
- What was Benjamin Franklin's writing method?
- Franklin made short notes on the meaning of each sentence in an essay from The Spectator, put the essay away for a few days, rewrote it in full from his notes, then compared his version with the original and corrected his faults.
- How old was Franklin when he did this?
- He was a teenage apprentice in his brother's Boston printing house. He signed his indentures at twelve, and his first published essays, the Silence Dogood letters, appeared in 1722 when he was sixteen.
- Is Franklin's method the same as copywork?
- It goes a step further. Copywork reproduces a text exactly. Franklin reconstructed a text from notes, so he had to supply his own words and then measure them against the original. Copying a passage first and then reconstructing it combines both.
- What is The Spectator?
- A daily London essay paper published in 1711 and 1712, written mainly by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Its essays on manners, morals and ideas were widely read and imitated, and they became models of clear English prose.
- Where can I find Franklin's account?
- In the first part of his Autobiography, which is in the public domain and free on Project Gutenberg. The passage begins “About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator.”