copy work - A Friday Challenge

Two ideas came to me as I lay abed this morning thinking of today's challenge. The first was the way fine art used to be taught - or at least one of its methods. Students would paint the masterpieces. Or draw them, or sculpt them. They might do this for quite awhile before they were freed to follow their own inclinations.

The other idea was a memory of something that used to happen in my own early childhood. Most of you will not remember this because it isn't your memory to draw from, but many children growing up in the first half of the last century did copywork. The habit lingered a bit into the fifties but not much beyond. Children would be given a piece of text from the Bible or Dickens or William Makepeace Thackeray and told to copy it in their best long hand. The idea was to improve their hand-writing but it also did something else. It got the rhythm of good writing into their hands and minds.

Here is a piece from the home-schooling site above that I linked to:

By and large, the greatest writers in the English language developed their writing skills through copywork and narration. Neither Shakespeare nor Jane Austen ever enrolled in a creative writing course; Dickens never studied journalism; Robert Louis Stevenson did not take classes in How to Write for Children (or for anyone else, for that matter)! Living before the invention of photocopy machines and computers, anything they wanted to keep a written record of, had to be copied down by hand: so copywork was a normal part of everyday life. Our children obviously live in a different age, but if we hope for them to become great writers, we can do no better than provide them with the same kind of training as these, and other, writers of the past.

 
I challenge you to do copywork. Pick a piece of writing - a page or two - from a writer who's writing you admire. It could be in the genre that you are writing but I would suggest you look for someone who's been proven in terms of their writing not their sale-ability. Now, copy that - not in long-hand unless that is how you write your own work, but on the computer. I guarantee you will experience a weird and wondrous feeling as you do so.

If you are hell-bent on improving your writing, you may do this exercise daily for a month. You might choose a variety of writer's or stick to one or two. I am going to do this. I think it will help with my slim grasp on grammar for one thing, and it will also help me with my agility with language. Again, it is brain-work, like the Kaizen is, for it lays down paths in our neural forest which we'll be able to find again and again. I don't know why education got away from it. Part of the massive dumming down movement, I suppose.