Seth Suggested

The blog continues…today is the second day of my blogging experiment and I am excited to continue forward.

I have been thinking about additional strategies to improve my writing ability. In addition to writing this daily (likely only on weekdays) blog, there are three other strategies that I want to implement to increase my writing skills.

Strategy 1:

I believe that it is essential for every writer to constantly be reading from many different authors on a wide variety of topics and genres. Robert Greene, the author of The 48 Laws of Power, believes that individuals tend to have boring, unoriginal thoughts if they do not read. He shares that reading opens our minds up to new ideas and perspectives that make our thoughts more profound and original. I read many books from various genres, decades, ideologies, and authors to challenge what I know about the world and expand my mind. I think it is also beneficial to read the news, newsletters, and to even watch movies and YouTube videos (if done thoughtfully). The point is to provide yourself opportunities to interact with new ideas.

Strategy 2:

I recently learned about the method called Copywork. Copywork is copying the work of an author you admire, not to be published as your own work, but simply to learn to write the way they do and improve your own writing. Using entire books, a few paragraphs, or even a singular quote, you write down or type what you want to copy.

Benjamin Franklin, Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), and Jack London (The Call of the Wild) are some of the notable people that have used copywork to improve their writing. Jack London reportedly taught himself to write by copying every page of Rudyard Kipling’s books. Another author Hunter S. Thompson, was said to have copied every page of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. If you want to be a great writer, why not copy the way the best wrote and add it to your own style. I hope to infuse various strengths of my favorite authors together in my writing.

I also realized that prior to learning about copywork, I have been using it in my life. Looking back at my education, everything changed for me in fifth grade. Prior to that year, I had struggled with reading and was often taken out of class to get extra reading help. This help, while good-intentioned left me feeling inferior to my classmates and affected my confidence in school. However, in fourth grade, I finally read my first chapter book, Kickoff! by Tiki and Ronde Barber and started to gain confidence in my ability to read.

Things didn’t fully come together until fifth grade. That year, my wonderful teacher Mrs. Crom had us take vocabulary quizzes each week, assigning us roughly ten words per quiz. To prepare for the quiz, we were given the assignment to write out whether it was a verb, noun, adjective, etc., a definition, and a sentence using the word. Coupling these vocabulary assignments and quizzes with a blossoming love of reading, my aptitude for school seemed to take off.

Without realizing it, I’ve been doing copywork in other aspects of my life. As a Christian, I read and study the word of God everyday. I annotate and mark passages and sections that I find impactful for me. I then take those passages, often copying word for word the text into a study notebook. By doing this copywork, I have noticed religious phrasing popup in my thought patterns and writing style.

Strategy 3:

The commonplace book is a strategy that I have started and stopped multiple times. But now, I want to use it with more consistency. The role of the commonplace book is to serve as your second brain. You add wisdom in the form of quotes, stories, and by paraphrasing from the things you have been studying. You then organize this information that you want to remember and reference in the future into categories.

I first learned of commonplace books from Ryan Holiday, author of The Obstacle is The Way. Holiday has written 12 best-selling books and everyday publishes his newsletter, Daily Stoic. He is also a prolific reader. To remember what he reads and to engage with the content, he uses a commonplace book in the form of a notecard system. Holiday takes wisdom from the books he reads, and writes quotes and insights on a notecard, and then organizes the notecards by a theme. When writing his books, he will reference specific themes, rereading and using what he has written on the notecards, to guide his process.

Other famous people such as Marcus Aurelius, Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon, and Bill Gates have used and do use commonplace books. If you want to learn more about how to create your own commonplace book or notecard system, I highly recommend the following two articles, one by Ryan Holiday and another by his research assistant, Billy Oppenheimer.

• https://ryanholiday.net/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-book/
• https://billyoppenheimer.com/notecard-system/

I look forward to further enhancements by using these three strategies.

Invitation: Evaluate what you are doing in your life to learn new things, and what you are doing to retain what you learn. Make the changes necessary to get the most out of learning opportunities.

My daily request of you, the reader: As I have stated as one of the purposes of me writing this blog is to increase my writing aptitude. So my request for you as a reader is to comment in response to the following questions when you are able to:

• Where are there errors (grammar, vocabulary, etc.) in my writing for this blog post?
• Were there any places in reading the blog that didn’t clearly flow? Where were you caught up?
• Any other suggestions for improving my writing? Tips, tricks, etc.?
• What is something that you are reading, watching, or listening to that you think I would find interesting?

Thank you for reading.

Until next blog, adieu.