Ben Franklin teaches himself to write:

"About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator - I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try'd to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand ... I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the paper. This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts. By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language."

Text reconstruction is the latter-day term for the method Ben Franklin invented to teach himself to write. In a modern text-reconstruction exercise, the sentences in a paragraph are listed out of order, and you are asked to reconstruct the original text. Later on, you re-write the original essay yourself using brief summaries of the content.

When you organize the sentences from someone else’s text, your mind is freed to focus on structure, which is a difficult aspect of writing to "see." Like Ben Franklin, you may find that some of your reconstructions are an improvement on the original.

Next, on a separate sheet of paper, copy each of the original paragraphs verbatim. Direct transcription is useful because the brain reads for gist, not detail. Most people neither notice nor recall whether a sentence has used the wording “both the children” or “the children both.” Reading for meaning is natural and normal, but in learning to write we need to read for technique, too. “Copywork” helps.