He started by reading several articles in the Spectator and writing down short descriptions of the content in each sentence. Franklin then waited a few days to put some distance between his inspiration and his efforts.

How did Benjamin Franklin start writing?

Franklin began his career as a writer when he was apprenticed to his brother, James Franklin, for whom he wrote his first published work: �grubstreet� ballads. ... Franklin learned to be a writer by laboriously copying and recopying articles in The Spectator and other models.

How did Franklin teach himself to write effectively?

Basically, he took notes at a sentence level, sat on them for a while, and tried to recreate the sentences from his own head, without looking at the originals. “Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.