There is no shortcut, but there is a method
Writing well is a skill, and like other skills it improves with practice that has a target and some way of checking the result. Simply writing more helps, but slowly, because it is hard to see your own habits. What speeds things up is studying how good writing is made and then trying to make it yourself.
It is worth being honest about the evidence. There is research on writing instruction, mostly about students, but little that tells an adult exactly which exercise to do on a Tuesday evening. The advice below is not a proven program. It is a set of practices that many writers have described using, that cost nothing to try, and that make sense on their face: you learn what good sentences look like by paying close attention to them.
Read like a writer
Reading a lot is the most common advice for writers, and it is good advice, but reading for the story or the argument is different from reading for the craft. To learn from a piece, read it a second time and ask how it works rather than what it says.
- How does it open? Look at the first two sentences. Do they make a claim, tell a story, ask a question?
- How long are the sentences? Notice where a short sentence follows several long ones and what it is doing there.
- How do paragraphs connect? Look at the first words of each paragraph. Many good essays move forward with very plain links: “But,” “So,” “The trouble is.”
- Where is the evidence? Find the examples, numbers and stories, and see how close they sit to the claims they support.
Choose writers whose prose you would like yours to resemble a little. Our author pages describe each writer's style, which makes it easier to pick a model on purpose instead of by accident.
Imitate writers you admire
Imitation sounds like the opposite of finding your own voice, but writers have long used it as training. The clearest account is by Robert Louis Stevenson, who describes in A College Magazine how he taught himself to write by copying the manner of authors he admired:
“I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann.”
He wrote the same piece three times, in the manner of three different writers, and concluded: “That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write.” Imitation works because it turns vague admiration into specific choices you have to make yourself. You cannot imitate a writer's rhythm without first noticing what it is.
The simplest form of imitation is copywork: copying a passage exactly, word for word. It forces slow, complete attention, and it is a good warm-up for the harder exercises below. On Copywork you do it by retyping essays over the original text.
Try Benjamin Franklin's method
Benjamin Franklin describes in his Autobiography how, as a teenager, he found an odd volume of The Spectator, the essay paper written by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele:
“I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it.”
His method is still one of the best exercises there is. He made short notes on the sense of each sentence, put the essay away for a few days, and then rewrote it in full from the notes alone. Then he compared his version with the original and corrected his faults. To work on organization, he sometimes jumbled his notes and tried to put them back in the best order before writing.
- Pick a short essay. A Spectator paper such as The Spectator, No. 10 lets you work from the same series Franklin did.
- Write a few words of notes for each sentence or paragraph, enough to remember the point but not the wording.
- Wait a day or more, until you have forgotten how the sentences went.
- Rewrite the piece from your notes, as fully as the original.
- Put the two side by side. Where did the original say it more simply, or more vividly? Where is yours wordier? Make a note of one habit to change.
The comparison is the part that teaches. It shows you, sentence by sentence, the difference between what you would have written and what a skilled writer did write.
Write often, in small pieces
Studying other writers only helps if you also write. Regular short pieces are easier to keep up than occasional long ones, and they give you more chances to practice beginnings and endings, which are the hardest parts. A paragraph a day explaining something you know, a short note on a book or a weekly post at work all count.
Give each piece one job. “Explain why our onboarding takes two weeks” is a job; “write about onboarding” is not. Writing with a specific reader and purpose in mind tends to make sentences plainer, because you keep asking whether they will understand.
Say one thing clearly
Most unclear writing comes from unclear thinking, so the first fix is to know your point. Try stating it in one sentence before you start, and again after you finish; if the two do not match, the draft has wandered. Then make the sentences carry it with as little friction as possible. The old advice still holds:
“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”
Strunk adds that this does not mean every sentence must be short, only that every word should tell. In practice: prefer concrete words to abstract ones, cut qualifiers like “very” and “quite” unless they change the meaning, put the important word at the end of the sentence, and use an example when a claim feels thin.
Revise in separate passes
First drafts are for finding out what you think. Revision is where most of the improvement happens, and it goes better when you do one kind of work at a time instead of fixing everything at once.
- Structure. Write one line summarizing each paragraph. Does the order make sense? Is anything missing or repeated?
- Paragraphs. Does each one have a clear point, and does its first sentence lead into it?
- Sentences. Read the piece aloud. Wherever you stumble or run out of breath, rewrite.
- Words. Cut what is not needed and replace vague words with exact ones.
If you can, leave a day between writing and revising. Time away makes your own sentences look more like someone else's, which is exactly what you need to judge them.
Get useful feedback
A reader can see what you cannot: the place where they got lost. General praise or criticism is less useful than a specific answer, so ask a specific question. “What do you think I am arguing?” and “Where did you start skimming?” get better answers than “Is this good?” If their summary does not match your point, the draft needs work, however good the sentences are.
Comparison with a model is another form of feedback, and one you can get on your own. That is what makes Franklin's method and copywork useful: the original essay is the standard you measure your attempt against.
A simple weekly plan
Here is one way to put this together. Adjust the amounts to your week; regularity matters more than volume.
- Three short copywork sessions of about fifteen minutes, retyping part of an essay by a writer you want to learn from. Start with something short, like Gifts by Ralph Waldo Emerson or Corn-pone Opinions by Mark Twain.
- One imitation exercise, such as rebuilding a few paragraphs from notes or writing a paragraph of your own in the manner of the essay you copied. Our writing exercises have ten to choose from.
- One piece of your own, even a short one, revised in separate passes before you share it.
If you also want to type faster, the copywork sessions double as typing practice on real paragraphs. To begin, pick an essay from the essay list or start with today's essay.