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Learning Write Well The Benjamin Franklin Way

…when my Father happened to find my papers…he took occasion to talk to me about the manner of my writing,observed that although I had the advantage of my antagonist in correct spelling and pointing (which I owed to the printing house), I fell far short in elegance of expression, in method and perspicuity, of which he convinced me by several instances.  I saw the justice of his remarks, and thence grew more attentive to the manner in writing, and determined to endeavor at improvement.

About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator.  It was the third.  I had never before seen any of them.  I bought it, read it over and over and was much delighted with it.  I thought the writing excellent, and wished if possible to imitate it.  With that view, I took some of the papers and making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and the without looking at he  book, tried to complete the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length and fully as it had been expressed before in and suitable words that should come to hand.

Then I compared my Specter with the original, discovered some of my faults and corrected them.  But I found I wanted a stock of words of readiness in recollecting and using them, (which I thought I should have acquired before that time), since the continual occasion for words of the same import but of different length, to suit the measure of of different sound for the rhyme would have laid me under a constant necessity of searching foe variety, and also have tended to fix variety in my mind, and make me master it.

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 to form the full sentences and complete the paper.  This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts,  By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language and this encouraged me to think I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely ambitious.        The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

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