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dghlsakjg

Copywork is an exercise where writers just copy verbatim another writers work.

If you haven’t done it, it is an extraordinary way to see how the greats work.

It also tends to improve your own writing skills - at least as long as you are copying from your betters.

This seems like the web design version of this.

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Related, Raymond Chandler says in his letters that he taught himself to write a novelette by copying one (by Erle Stanley Gardner). He took the original story and wrote a detailed synopsis, then wrote a novelette from the synopsis, compared it to the original, did rewrites, and so on until he understood what tricks Gardner had used to make the scenes work.

Ben Franklin did this as well. He writes about this exercise in his autobiography.

Well I did not learn to write, but came to appreciate a certain kind of minimalism by using a recursive 4-stages narrative model (Greimas) to study some novels by Haruki Murakami.

What really struck me was the fact every single segment down to the level of phrases had a well-delimited function with respect to the rest of the story. A well told story is like a perfect tiling. No gaps that couldn't possibly be closed, no overlap, every tile well-delimited and composing nicely with its neighbors, and more importantly, a way to decompose well aligned tiles (summaries) into well-aligned subtiles (elaborations): if these conditions are met, you'll be able to write a story that conserves something at every scale, i.e. coherence, and hopefully the interest of the reader!

A bit tough to say this, but transformers are trained the same way.

No. They're trained on the data, but there's no point in training at which they go through some exercise that involves creating copies of some of their input using the model being trained.

In any case, why is it "a bit tough to say this"? You thought your ability to learn was irreproducible?

You're right that I jumped the gun and the analogy is not accurate. The point where they are similar is that you have the prefix as context as you try to type out the next word; it is a more deliberate form of reading, and when you do this there's an element of anticipation and analysis as you write each word. It's not quite the same as constantly trying to guess the next word, in my mind the elevated way of thinking was close, probably as close as it's humanely possible, but the analogy does break down there.

On the other hand, you can embrace all this and still let others weep about humanity a little.

Jazz musicians also copy each other's solos for learning and practice purposes, but they would never actually perform more than a couple well placed quotes or licks from another player.

I think there's a big difference between jazz and corporate landing pages. Should we be surprised or shocked when different brands of microwave ovens have very similar controls?

> Should we be surprised or shocked when different brands of microwave ovens have very similar controls?

No, but OTOH I'd be a little bit surprised and confused if someone who designed microwave oven controls wrote a self-important blog post about how skillfully they copied another's design.

> "I think there's a big difference between jazz and corporate landing pages."

Hard agree. I had to laugh at that sentence. I realized it wasn't really a fair analogy but also just kind of going off the copywriting example above. It's interesting how helpful this kind of thing is for different disciplines.

Perhaps there has been some convergence towards microwave usability that I haven't experienced yet.

Microwave oven keypad controls are a terrible example: I've had some terrible troubles attempting to use ones that force you to set power level - half the time start isn't even obvious...

I bought one with a timer knob and a power knob that is mostly usable (but still poorly designed in some ways). Usable enough that I bought the same model for my parents. I would like the power level to be a slider not a digital knob, even though the knob is an improvement over a keypad.

Obligatory link to a relevant Jorge Luis Borges story: Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (about an author who copied Don Quixote word for word)

https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/Engl10/Pierre-Mena...

Pierre Menards Quixote is not a copy. It is a perfect recreation. While it is word-for-word identical to the original, the whole ironic humor of Borges text is that it is not a copy.

Edit: Which you might know well enough. Just wanted to add some more context.

i have a vague memory of hunter s thompson talking about sitting down and typing out the great gatsby to see how it would feel to write a great american novel

I too wanted to make this point. In art and designing, copying is how you learn and how you kick start your creativity and innovativeness.

This also works in drawing and painting. One of my painting teachers used to admonish us: "copy, copy, copy".

This was my first thought as well. Hunter S. Thompson used to copy Hemingway by hand to internalize his cadence.

Also connected: many composers would write out previous great works, to learn them more deeply. Bach as I recall would do this.

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