6/25/2023 0 Comments Benjamin franklin walter isaacson![]() ![]() He may also have been, as the great literary historian Carl Van Doren has flatly declared, "the best writer in America" during his lifetime. More than making himself merely "tolerable," he became the most popular writer in colonial America. ![]() "But I sometimes had the pleasure," he recalled, "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 that I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely ambitious." When he found his own version wanting, he would correct it. Sometimes he would even turn the notes into poetry, which helped him expand his vocabulary by forcing him to search for words with the right rhythm or rhyme, before trying to recreate what Addison and Steele had written. He would read the essays of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in The Spectator, the irreverent London daily that flourished in 1711-12, take notes, jumble them up, set them aside, and then return to them a few days later to see how well he could replicate the original. ![]() When he was a young teenager working as an apprentice at his brother's printing shop in Boston, Benjamin Franklin, America's original apostle of self improvement, devised a wonderful little method to teach himself how to be a powerful and persuasive writer. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |