Before you start: choose a model
Most of these exercises use a model text: an essay by a writer whose prose you would like yours to resemble a little. Pick something you enjoy and can read without strain, and start short; a piece of 1,000 to 2,000 words is plenty. Read it once all the way through for pleasure before you start taking it apart.
You can choose from the essays on Copywork or browse by author and writing style. Public-domain classics such as Gifts by Ralph Waldo Emerson and The Spectator, No. 10 by Joseph Addison can be typed in full without an account.
Copying exercises
These train attention. Copying is slow on purpose: it makes you look at every word and punctuation mark you would skim past when reading. (More on the method in what is copywork?)
1. Exact copywork
15 minutes · Practices close attention to sentence shape
Copy three or four paragraphs of your model exactly, keeping the author's punctuation, capitals and paragraph breaks. Before each sentence, read it through once so you are copying a thought, not a string of letters. On Copywork you retype the essay over the original text and mistakes are highlighted as you go. Handwriting works too.
2. One sentence from memory
15 minutes · Practices holding a whole sentence in your head
Read one sentence, look away and type it from memory. Then check it against the original. Where your version differs is usually where the writer did something you would not have done: an inverted word order, an unexpected verb, a clause in a surprising place. Plain, well-built prose such as Corn-pone Opinions by Mark Twain is a good place to start.
3. Copy, then take notes
20 minutes · Practices naming what a writer does
After copying a passage, write down three things you noticed. Useful questions:
- How many words are in each of the first five sentences? Where does a short one appear?
- How do the paragraphs begin? With a claim, an example, a link to the paragraph before?
- Which word choice surprised you, and what would the plain alternative have been?
Keep these notes. They become a checklist for the imitation exercises later.
Rebuilding exercises
These come from Benjamin Franklin, who taught himself to write as a teenager by working with essays from The Spectator. They are harder than copying, and more revealing, because you produce the sentences yourself and then see how they compare.
4. Rebuild an essay from notes
Two sessions of 30 minutes · Practices expression and word choice
Read a short essay and write a few words of notes on the sense of each sentence. Put the essay away for a few days. Then, using only your notes, write the essay out in full. Finally, compare your version with the original sentence by sentence and mark where the author was clearer, shorter or more vivid. Franklin describes doing exactly this:
“Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.”
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography The Spectator, No. 10 is about 1,300 words, a manageable length for a first try.
5. Put scrambled notes back in order
30 minutes · Practices arranging an argument
Make notes on an essay as in exercise 4, one note per paragraph, and shuffle them. A few days later, put them back in the order you think works best and write from that order. Then compare your arrangement with the author's. Franklin did this “to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts.” If your order differs, ask which one a reader would find easier to follow, and why.
6. Reverse outline
20 minutes · Practices seeing structure
Write a single sentence summarizing each paragraph of a model essay. Read the list on its own: it shows the skeleton the author built on, and where they spent their words. Poe's The Philosophy of Composition is an interesting one to outline, because it is itself an account of how he says he built a poem step by step. Then do the same for a draft of your own and look for paragraphs without a clear job.
Imitation and revision
The last four exercises move from someone else's writing to yours. They are where copying turns into a style of your own.
7. Imitate one sentence
15 minutes · Practices sentence structure
Take a sentence you like and write a new one on your own subject with the same structure: the same number of clauses, in the same order, with the same punctuation. For example, the opening of William Hazlitt's On Going a Journey:
“One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like to go by myself.”
William Hazlitt, “On Going a Journey” (1822) An imitation might be: “One of the best parts of the week is the Saturday market; but I like to get there early.” Do five of these from the same essay and the pattern starts to feel natural.
8. One paragraph, three styles
45 minutes · Practices range and control
Robert Louis Stevenson describes in A College Magazine writing the same piece three times: “first in the manner of Hazlitt, second in the manner of Ruskin, who had cast on me a passing spell, and third, in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas Browne.” Try a small version. Write one paragraph about something that happened to you this week, then rewrite it in the manner of two writers who sound very different, for example Michel de Montaigne and Mark Twain. Notice which choices you had to change: sentence length, vocabulary, how much of yourself appears.
9. Cut a draft by a third
20 minutes · Practices concision
Take something you wrote recently, count the words and cut a third of them without losing any idea. Remove repetition first, then qualifiers and throat-clearing openings, then rewrite sentences that take the long way round. The goal is not short sentences but, as William Strunk Jr. put it in The Elements of Style, that the writer “make every word tell.”
10. Read aloud and mark the stumbles
15 minutes · Practices rhythm
Read a paragraph of your model aloud, then a paragraph of your own. Mark every place in your draft where you stumble, run out of breath or lose the thread, and rewrite those sentences until they read easily. Long, winding sentences such as those in Charles Lamb's Dream-Children: A Reverie are good practice for hearing how a long sentence can still flow.
Putting them into a week
You do not need to do all ten. A sustainable routine is two or three short copying sessions (exercises 1 to 3) and one longer exercise from the other groups each week, using the same model essay for a week or two before you move on. Regular, focused practice is more useful than an occasional long session.
For the reasoning behind these exercises and more on reading, revising and feedback, see how to become a better writer. If you want the copying sessions to improve your typing too, read about typing practice on real essays. Or start now with today's essay.