Just before I started typing out this missive, I was busily wracking my brain figuring out a riddle of sorts.
Specifically, one of Write Way Reader John Bejakovic’s Copy Riddles.
Anyone who’s been around for a few weeks knows John because I interviewed him for three issues of the Write Way.
I’ve also bought a number of his programs including the excellent Copy Riddles, which I bought back in September 2023…
…and am finally getting round to working through.
All that is by introduction, because this email is not promoting Copy Riddles (maybe some day).
Instead, I want to share a powerful writing exercise that can significantly increase your ability if you put in the work.
And not just for copywriting either.
See, Copy Riddles works in a super simple and supremely effective way, to teach you the skill of writing sales bullets (short teasers that persuade people to buy a product):
John gives you a passage from a product.
You write three bullets from that passage.
You click a button and reveal the bullet that the original A-List copywriter wrote
John explains how and why it works.
Repeat over and over until you get it.
It’s extremely insightful, and far more practical and helpful than some talking head video. I may indeed be borrowing this approach for a future course some day…
…but I just realised that it works almost exactly the same as a famous Writing Exercise.
An exercise that has been shared far and wide and yet often still neglected.
From the eponymous 18th Century Genius himself:
Benjamin Franklin.
Old Bennie Franks was born dirt poor and dreadful at writing, but eventually became a printer, publisher, author, inventor, scientist, and diplomat.
Oh, and he also helped draft the Declaration of Independence, so I guess the writing part paid off.
So how did he learn to write?
Dear reader, it is simple (not easy, but simple).
He would find writing in The Spectator that he found particularly fine and attempt to learn how the author achieved the effect. To backtest it and try and replicate it, just like what Copy Riddles is helping me do for sales bullets.
In his own words:
“With this view I took some of the papers, 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.
Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.
Got that?
It’s brain-dead simple.
Find some writing you love…
…turn it into an outline…
…go away for a few days…
…come back to your outline and write the piece out yourself in your best words.
Then get the original and compare what you did with what the author did. Why did they make the choices you didn’t make? Is it better? Why?
What were you missing?
Was yours too complex? Or too plain? Did they make it more concrete?
All the things, by the way, that I teach you week by week in the Write Way Newsletter, or in courses like Effective Editing. But this exercise gives you a practical guided way to work through them all with your favourite writing.
The thing is…
…that’s the part that everyone shares but there’s more to Franklin’s writing success than just that.
He also used the same technique to work on structuring his prose:
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.
Ignore the spelling of complete as compleat, they did strange things in those days.
But you see how you can use this?
It’s just the age old taking it apart in order to see how it works and put it all back together again. You can do that at the level of sentences…
…and at the level of structures.
(Effective Editing buyers will recognise that distinction and have another layer through which to look at it. Because you can do this with your own writing too. I may add something on this to the course when I get a minute.)
Three things that make up great writing:
Beautiful sentences, helpful structure and…
…choosing the right words.
One of the glories of the English langauge is that we have words that mean a dozen things and a dozen words that mean various nuances of the same thing.
But how do you learn them?
How do you build a vocabulary of words so that you can help yourself to whatever you need?
Well, I’ve said it before. You read. A lot.
And you also read the dictionary, learn new words, make an effort to study tools.
But Ben Frankly has a great additional exercise to add to your arsenal, and it speaks to my heart as a poet:
But I found I wanted a stock of words, or a readiness in recollecting and using them, which I thought I should have acquired before that time if I had gone on making verses; since the continual occasion for words of the same import, but of different length, to suit the measure, or of different sound for the rhyme, would have laid me under a constant necessity of searching for variety, and also have tended to fix that variety in my mind, and make me master of it.
Yes, yes, and a thousand times yes.
If you want a wide-ranging vocabulary of words you actually know when and where to use? You need to force yourself into situations where you can’t just use the same words over and over again.
Writing content won’t cut it.
You need to write something that stretches you, and what better than proper, structured, traditional poetry?
Not only will you be forced to reach for words that rhyme but you’ll regularly find yourself needing a one-syllable word or a two-syllable word when you were reaching for a three-syllable word. You’ll need a word with a harder sound to hit the rhythm right. You’ll need a longer word to fill the space and so on.
If you want to grow, you have to work out.
You have to put yourself into situations where you actually need the growth, or else you’ll never do it.
What do you think, dear reader?
Will you give Ben Franklin’s exercise a shot?
Would you be interested in a course where I do the hard legwork of finding great prose and analysing it?
It wouldn’t be for a while, I’ve got a few other things like The Art of the Start, updates to Effective Editing etc. to do first, but if there’s enough interest maybe I’ll start to pull it together.
Meanwhile, tamp down your tobacco and break down some prose,
Yours,
James Carran, Craftsman Writer
fin
P.s. Carran’s Cabin Crewmembers will be interested to know that I had no idea what I was writing in this issue until I opened it up and thought “ah… Franklin, it’s about time I talked about that.” See yesterday’s email…
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