How to improve your writing with Ben Franklin's drills (detailed explanation with examples)

Main Ideas

The video presents a seven-part writing practice inspired by Benjamin Franklin’s writing drills. The exercises use a model passage to help writers actively notice and reproduce choices in wording, rhythm, and organization. The presenter emphasizes that the work should be effortful rather than passive: trying to recreate a passage and then comparing the result is more useful than simply reading examples.

The demonstration uses a short passage from A Game of Thrones. The presenter notes that the drills can be repeated on the same passage until its lessons become more familiar.

The Seven Drills

1. Choose a passage and make notes for each sentence. Write brief prompts that capture each sentence’s meaning or structure without copying it. These notes are reminders, or “crutches,” for the next step; there is no single correct format. For example, a note might record that a sentence is long, that questions and answers occur in the morning, or that a character cannot remember what happened.

2. Rewrite the passage from memory using only the notes. Put the original aside and use the prompts to reconstruct each sentence. The aim is not to reproduce the passage perfectly, but to make a deliberate effort to recall how the author expressed the ideas.

3. Compare your draft with the original and correct it. Examine differences in wording, sentence order, punctuation, and detail. The presenter describes this comparison as one of the most important parts of the process: it reveals what the writer noticed or missed in the model. The FranklinWrite website can display differences and help users correct their sentences.

4. Turn the passage into poetry. Rewrite it as a poem, song, rap, or another rhythmic form. There are no strict rules; the purpose is to experiment with rhythm and flow.

5. Turn the poem back into prose. Use the poem as a prompt to write a prose version. This reinforces attention to the original passage while giving the writer room to create a personal version.

6. Jumble the sentence notes, then put them back in order. Rearrange the notes and try to reconstruct the passage’s sequence. This is intended to build awareness of how ideas are organized and how one sentence leads to the next.

7. Repeat the process as desired. Repeating the drills on a passage can deepen familiarity with its techniques and make the lessons more ingrained.

FranklinWrite Website Walkthrough

The presenter demonstrates how the FranklinWrite website can support the exercises:

• Franklin’s Library contains passages for practice, organized into categories such as genre and title. Users select a passage and work through the drills.
• Your Library lets users add their own writing or passages. The presenter demonstrates entering a title and author, adding passages and sentences, and selecting them for practice.
• The site can provide prompts, help compare a user’s draft with the model, show similarity information, and automate parts of the practice process.
• The site also includes progress statistics and a demo. The presenter describes it as free.

Announcements

The presenter invites viewers to join the FranklinWrite subreddit to ask questions, suggest features, report problems, and participate in a writing community. He says the site may be improved with easier navigation and a way to upload PDFs or text files so passages can be extracted more easily. He also says his brother Jackie will help moderate the subreddit.

Speakers and Sources Featured

• Darren — the video’s presenter and founder of FranklinWrite.
• Jackie — Darren’s brother, mentioned as a subreddit moderator; he does not speak in the subtitles.
• Benjamin Franklin — cited as the inspiration for the drills; he is not a speaker in the video.
• George R. R. Martin and A Game of Thrones — the author and book used for the demonstration passage.