Comment by panglott | Hacker News Reader

Comment by panglott | Hacker News Reader

The problem with looking at how Ben Franklin developed his skills is that he had relatively fewer books to read and he had many fewer demands on his attention. For example, I read a piece a while ago discussing how Franklin learned Italian: he and some friends make a competition of memorizing an Italian grammar book.

This is a terrible way to learn Italian, by modern thinking; because almost nobody is actually going to do it, and it won't actually get you speaking Italian. It's incredibly demanding for little reward. But if you know nobody who speaks Italian, have an Italian grammar book and immense dedication, and no TV or video games to fill the long, lonely, candlelit hours, I suppose you might as well?

Similarly, hand-copying and re-writing Spectator articles multiple times in multiple forms is probably a (labor-intensive) way to improve your prose. But today we have word processors with copy and paste and blogs. Why not just write there and practice rewriting that?

I don't think the main takeaway is about writing by hand. A word processor is fine too. What's important here is the act of "active writing" vs "passive writing".

Franklin's method forces you to create writing (instead of just ingesting it) and then gives you specific feedback on whether you succeeded or failed (through comparison to the original).

The dissect-chunking-integrate-feedback model works everywhere, and what fascinates me is that Franklin figured it out through his own experiments.

For distraction-free writing, instead of a word processor I recommend Draft[0].

[0]https://draftin.com/

Pandoc is also a easy way to write markdown in a distraction-free editor and compile to docx, PDF, or latex

I dig Ulysses for the Mac[0]. Its distraction-free mode is very nice, but the organizational tools are there once you need to start stringing together larger pieces of text.

I do wish someone would make a non-OSX version that was as nice.

[0]https://ulyssesapp.com/

Ulysses really bothers me because it's not "real" Markdown, so simple stuff like copy-pasting something with a link in it breaks.

Have you heard of Scrivener? It's available for both OSX and PC, and I believe there's an iOS version, too. It's really wonderful. The organizational tools are just incredible, and are only as complicated and involved as you want them to be.

Whoa, missed this. Sorry for the late reply.

I have! I like Scrivener as well and it's very powerful but its "does everything" functionality has led to some bloat in the UI department. Ulysses seems more thoughtfully designed but doesn't have the same breadth of features.

Draftin is a great. I often use the Hemingway writing mode (no backspace or delete). I make the browser full screen, switch off the spell checker, and just write.

I don't mind the concept of a third party hosted document editor, after all I use google docs.

But what does irritate is that the site has dozens of third party scripts, including passing on your email to "intercom" and a bunch of other trackers without hashing it or using a different tracker Id.

So you not only have to trust the content to Draft, you have to trust it to a dozen third parties with which you have no relationship.

And to achieve nothing you can't achieve by setting your preferred text editor to full screen.

Heck set your taskbar to "auto-hide" and notepad.exe can replicate what you've got there.

Hmm interesting, I hadn't thought of looking at the scripts and such, thanks for the heads up. I do like the interface (the distraction-free and Hemingway modes as someone else mentioned) but I don't like the idea of my data being leaked. A desktop-based approach for drafts might make more sense as you say.

My main point was about how Franklin's methods used a lot of tedious overwork. Hand-copying is an illustrative aspect of that, yes, but memorizing the text of an Italian grammar book is of similarly limited value even if you are using Anki and distration-free writing software to do it.

I believe the idea behind "rewrite a well-written article in another form" is to focus your mind upon analyzing, breaking down, and emulating Good Writing. You'll be closely reading the work of someone better than you, rather than taking your own writing and trying to improve it without any real models of what would be better.

Which would a novice programmer learn more from: blindly using whatever sort function their standard library provides; flailing around until they invent something like bubble sort and trying to optimize it; or reading about a few sort algorithms, picking one, and implementing it in their language of choice?

(A pro, of course, would probably either use stdlib's sort, or know where to find a library of multiple sorts that someone spent days tweaking for amazing performance within various constraints.)

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