Sharpen Your Writing Chops in One Hour

Whether you’re copywriter, a content marketer, a novelist, or a journalist, there’s a little-known teaching tool available to everyone that can dramatically improve your writing in just an hour.

Find a writer who’s better than you and type their best work verbatim into your own word processor.

This is only plagiarism if you publish it, and you’re not going to publish it. (We certainly hope not, anyway.) This is just an exercise, a teaching tool, and it’s a powerful one.

Typing someone else’s words onto your own screen is the most intimate of all possible writing acts. It’s as if you’re opening up your mind and letting someone else take over for a while, almost as if you’re channeling them.

If you’re a novelist and spend an hour or so typing James Lee Burke’s lush descriptions, Raymond Carver’s spare prose, or Lee Child’s gripping action scenes, you’ll get a far better feel for how and why their words and sentences work so well than you ever could from just reading them.

Likewise, if you’re a copywriter who admires, say, the picture-window quality of the words on Adobe’s website, spend an hour or two typing that copy word-for-word onto your own screen. After a while, you’ll get so used to it that writing it yourself will seem easy.

It won’t be easy, but rest assured that it’s not easy for the writers you want to emulate either. They take great care in crafting and editing their copy to near perfection.

By typing the words, sentences, and paragraphs of great writers, your brain will process the way they use language at the deepest possible level. When their words flow from your eyes, through your brain, out your fingertips, and onto your own screen, you’ll be training yourself—subconsciously as well as consciously—to write more like them than you already do.

You’ll get a feel for word selection, pacing, sentence rhythm, information flow, and subtle touches that are hard to explain and even notice when you’re passively reading. It’s like having a great teacher sitting next to you and saying, “watch me and do exactly what I do.” If you spend enough time doing this, next time you get stuck you’ll be able to ask yourself what the great writers you’ve copied would do, and you’ll know the answer.

You can’t turn yourself into the next Hemingway even if you retype every word the man ever wrote, but if you re-type a lot of it, your own work will be far more Hemingway-esque than it used to be. Guaranteed.

Go ahead. Pick a writer who’s better than you are. Pick one of the masters and become that writer for an hour or two. You may be astonished at the results when you get back to work.