Reading to become a better writer

I'm a relative novice when it comes to writing and have found myself in a rut when it comes to adding the flair I need to actually engage someone in my writing. I've scoured for a while on books for structure and now I find my writing reads off as the textbooks I've read. Are there any books dealing with the study of style that could help me not only broaden my vernacular, but make my writing more interesting.

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There is an article about Benjamin Franklin's technique to become a better writer. Let me find it.

I'll be waiting

Found it.

>Early in his autobiography Franklin describes how as a young man he worked to improve his writing. The education he had received as a child had left him, by his own assessment, not much more than an average writer. Then he ran across an issue of the British magazine The Spectator and found himself impressed by the quality of the writing in its pages. Franklin decided that he would like to write that well, but he had no one to teach him how. What could he do? He came up with a series of clever techniques aimed at teaching himself how to write as well as the writers of The Spectator.

>He first set out to see how closely he could reproduce the sentences in an article once he had forgotten their exact wording. So he chose several of the articles whose writing he admired and wrote down short descriptions of the content of each sentence—just enough to remind him what the sentence was about. After several days he tried to reproduce the articles from the hints he had written down. His goal was not so much to produce a word-for-word replica of the articles as to create his own articles that were as detailed and well written as the original. Having written his reproductions, he went back to the original articles, compared them with his own efforts, and corrected his versions where necessary. This taught him to express ideas clearly and cogently.

>The biggest problem he discovered from these exercises was that his vocabulary was not nearly as large as those of the writers for The Spectator. It wasn’t that he didn’t know the words, but rather that he didn’t have them at his fingertips when he was writing. To fix this he came up with a variation of his first exercise. He decided that writing poetry would force him to come up with a plethora of different words that he might not normally think of because of the need to fit the poem’s rhythm and the rhyming pattern, so he took some of the Spectator articles and transformed them into verse. Then, after waiting long enough that his memory of the original wording had faded, he would transform the poems back into prose. This got him into the habit of finding just the right word and increased the number of words he could call up quickly from his memory.

A Dash of Style. It's a book on punctuation and its uses. It gives a ton of examples from great authors and goes into the different ways each has used punctuation to give their writing a certain rhythm. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would.

>Finally, Franklin worked on the overall structure and logic of his writing. Once again, he worked with articles from The Spectator and wrote hints for each sentence. But this time he wrote the hints on separate pieces of paper and then jumbled them so that they were completely out of order. Then he waited long enough that not only had he forgotten the wording of the sentences in the original articles, but he had also forgotten their order, and he tried once again to reproduce the articles. He would take the jumbled hints from one article and arrange them in what he thought was the most logical order, then write sentences from each hint and compare the result with the original article. The exercise forced him to think carefully about how to order the thoughts in a piece of writing. If he found places where he’d failed to order his thoughts as well as the original writer, he would correct his work and try to learn from his mistakes. In his typically humble way, Franklin recalled in his autobiography how he could tell that the practice was having its desired effect: “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.”

>Franklin was too modest, of course. He went on to become one of the most admired writers of early America, with Poor Richard’s Almanack and, later, his autobiography becoming classics of American literature. Franklin solved a problem—wanting to improve, but having no one to teach him how—which many people face from time to time. Maybe you can’t afford a teacher, or there is no one easily accessible to teach what you want to learn. Maybe you’re interested in improving in some area where there are no experts, or at least no teachers. Whatever the reasons are, it is still possible to improve if you follow some basic principles from deliberate practice—many of which Franklin seems to have intuited on his own.

>The hallmark of purposeful or deliberate practice is that you try to do something you cannot do—that takes you out of your comfort zone—and that you practice it over and over again, focusing on exactly how you are doing it, where you are falling short, and how you can get better. Real life—our jobs, our schooling, our hobbies—seldom gives us the opportunity for this sort of focused repetition, so in order to improve, we must manufacture our own opportunities. Franklin did it with his exercises, each focused on a particular facet of writing.

>Franklin’s approach offers an excellent template for developing mental representations when you have little or no input from instructors. When he analyzed the writing in The Spectator and figured out what made it good, he was—although he didn’t think of it in these terms—creating a mental representation that he could use to guide his own work. The more he practiced, the more highly developed his mental representations became, until he could write at the level of The Spectator without having a concrete example in front of him. He had internalized good writing—which is just another way of saying that he had built mental representations that captured its salient features.

>Ironically, this is exactly what Franklin failed to do as a chess player. With writing, he studied the work of experts and tried to reproduce it; when he failed to reproduce it well enough, he would take another look at it and figure out what he had missed so that he would do better the next time. But this is exactly how chess players improve most effectively—by studying the games of grandmasters, trying to reproduce them move by move, and, when they choose a move that is different from what the grandmaster chose, studying the position again to see what they missed. Franklin could not apply this technique to chess, however, because he had no easy access to the games of masters. Almost all of them were in Europe, and at the time there were no books with their collected games for him to study. If he had had some way to study the masters’ games, he might well have become one of the best chess players of his generation. He was certainly one of its best writers.

This is from Peak: Secrets From The New Science Of Expertise by Anders Ericcson.

Gotchu senpai:

The Oxford Essential Guide to Writing - Thomas S. Kane

The best guides are also anthologies of examples to help develop your style. It's hard to take prescriptions at their face value without understanding why they work and being given a direction to steer yourself in.

This is fucking genius. Why don't we see advice like this given... ever?

Because English apartments don't give a shit about technique or craftsmanship anymore- they care about the social message of literature, and why it's problematic. Almost all modern academic literary criticism is either feminist or marxist.

Franklin lived in a time before the separation of the liberal arts and hard sciences.

Another thing you can do is something I've been doing- read one page of the Oxford English Dictionary every day.

The original edition. It has 15,490 pages. It will take you 42 years to read the entire thing. But you will increase your vocabulary after 42 years to 414,800. Most people have a vocabulary of 10,000 words.

If you focus only on words you don't know the definition of, you'll add 10,000 words to your vocabulary every year. So after one year you'll double your vocabulary.

oh give me a break. back to /pol/ with you.