Let Your Kid Plagiarize
How Copying Masters Helps Create Exceptional Writers
Great writing isn’t just about great ideas, it’s about communicating those ideas.
At first glance, The Old Man and the Sea a simple story about a man catching a fish.
That’s it. That’s the whole story.
But Hemingway tells this story with such depth that sometimes you feel like that old man on the wide open sea, with your hands aching and belly empty, striving for something sensational.
Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated. ~Hemingway
How do we train our children to write like Hemingway?
Easy → By copying him.
A bunch of you just went wait, what? Isn’t that plagiarism?
I’ll get back to that in a minute, but first let me ask you a different question.
Is it plagiarism to do calculus?
After all, that’s someone else’s idea (many others’ in fact). Mathematicians who spend their careers making new math (yes, there is new math) all started the same way we did - learning addition. They mastered math by first copying math that was already known.
Writing isn’t different. First, you learn and copy from the best. Once mastered, you make new.
The goal is to move children from copying to mastery, from plagiarism to finding their own voice.
In today’s post, you’ll learn👇
4 steps to learn writing from the masters
A simple secret to help them build beautiful prose
One key to finding their unique voice
My favorite resource to help you
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