The system of Deliberate Practice, and its applications to writing, is one of the core themes of this newsletter. Most people know at some level that to make improvements in chosen skill areas you have to practice. There are few resources on how to practice, or even what successful practice actually looks like.
In this issue I’m going to introduce the three different types of practice that you can do. One practice type you should never do (which is the one most people do). One practice type should make up the bulk of your practice activites. And the third practice type is used if you’re 100% happy with your current ability level.
Those three different practice types are:
Random practice.
Improvement practice.
Maintenance practice.
Let’s look at each in more detail.
#1. Random Practice
Random practice is the kind of practice most people default to if they are “learning by themselves.” And it’s the least effective.
If you’ve ever been to a driving range at your local golf course, the chances are that you’ll see random practice in action in every lane.
Random practice in this scenario looks like this:
The aspiring golfer has no plan in mind, other than to hit a bucket’s worth of balls with different clubs
Because there’s no plan in mind, there’s usually no attempt to record results of each drive either.
Because there’s no measurement of each individual shot, there’s no attempt at identifying errors. And, more importantly, no attempt at fixing those errors.
I don’t play golf, but I’ve taken my sons to the local driving range many time. The primary aim for most golfers seems to be to smash the covering off each and every golf ball with a random selection of clubs.
True story: one of the times I took my eldest son (who is the keener golfer of my boys) I asked him what his weakest club was.
He told me it was the irons.
So I made him leave his driver and woods in the car, and I asked one of the golf pros what were the ideal distances to aim for with each of his irons .
Then I made him hit 30 balls with each iron at different targets. After each shot I asked him to tell me what he’d done right, what he’d done wrong, and how to correct that. For example if his shot at the 80 metre target was 10 metres too short, he had to hit fractionally harder.
And so on.
As we were leaving at the end of this iron intensive session - and remember, I’m not a golfer - one of the older guys in the range came over to us and asked if I had a card as he wanted to book a lesson with me!
He didn’t believe me when I told him I’d never played golf and wasn’t a golf teacher.
Probably the reason he thought I was a golf teacher is that few "teachers" in any discipline actually know how to teach in a systematic way that's guaranteed to get results, and hearing me work with my son led him to a faulty assumption.
How Can You Identify If You Are Doing Random Practice
The symptoms of random practice are:
No specific goal BEFORE practice starts.
No meaningful measurement of what your practice achieves.
No attempt to identify errors and correct them.
There’s one other feature of random practice that sabotages any attempts at improvement: there’s no coherent (and preferably sequential) structure in place that guides all your practice activities.
In most disciplines there’s an identifiable learning sequence that needs to be followed in order to make improvement. The reason: foundational skills need to be learned, practiced and internalised before more advanced skills can be layered on top.
Random practice ignores any kind of learning sequence - and makes the task of learning exponentially harder.
#2. Improvement Practice
Improvement practice is practice that’s designed for improvement. In an ideal world improvement practice forms the bulk of your practice activites.
The key word in the previous sentence is designed.
To create improvements in your writing (or any discipline) you need to:
Identify where you currently are.
Identify where you want to get to.
Identify the areas that will take you from where you are to where you want to get to.
Create practice exercises that move you along that path.
Do the exercises.
If you cross reference this Issue with Issue #5 of PTWS, Improvement Practice equates to practicing in the learning zone.
Also note that to design practice activities that lead to improvements you have to be clear about where you’re trying to get to as a writer. Having the goal of ‘being a better writer’ is almost useless.
How Can You Identify If You Are Doing Improvement Practice
Signs that your practice is improvement practice include:
The practice is hard, it feels like work. You’re learning - it is hard.
You encounter resistance.
You know what you’re going to practice the day (or week) before you practice. Because your practice is planned out. That’s part of the design process.
You conduct periodic reviews of both your writing and your practice.
You notice incremental improvements in your writing as a result of your practice.
The most efficient form of improvement practice is deliberate practice. This is one of the core topics of Practicing The Write Stuff. And we’ll be returning to this again and again in future issues.
We need to talk about the third kind of practice though.
#3 Maintenance Practice
Few practice manuals or practice methods in any discipline talk about maintenance practice.
Maintenance practice is implied in this famous quote from pianist and composer Ignacy Paderewski:
“If I miss one day of practice, I notice it. If I miss two days, the critics notice it. If I miss three days, the audience notices it.”
Maintenance practice is practice that’s intentionally designed to maintain your ability level in your chosen discipline at its current level.
The majority of practice that elite performers do is maintenance practice. Because elite performers operate at such high levels, the only way to create improvement is by adopting a “marginal gains” approach. (We’ll cover marginal gains in a future issue of PTWS).
The marginal gains approach (which uses deliberate practice) layers naturally on top of maintenance practice to create improvement over long periods of time. Those time frames are measured in months and years.
The Good News For Writers
The good news for writers is that if you write at regular intervals - for example multiple times a day, daily, or three to five times a week - then you don’t have to schedule maintenance practice into your writing life.
The act of consistent writing, combined with editing, functions as maintenance practice. This is the case even though maintenance practice is unlikely to be the primary goal for your regular writing sessions.
However….
…The Bad News For Writers…
…is that writing regularly won’t lead to constant and consistent improvement.
If you write regularly - remember, this is a form of maintenance practice - what you are essentially doing is further automating the things that you can already do.
How Can You Identify If You Are Doing Maintenance Practice
The main symptoms that your writing is doubling as maintenance practice are:
In the editing process you find similar errors cropping up repeatedly
There’s no sign of improvement in your work, despite multiple writing sessions over weeks and months
Also note that elite performers target maintaining their current ability level as a practice goal. For most writers whose writing functions as maintenance practice, it’s a by product of those writing sessions rather than a specific practice goal.
#4 A Simple Exercise To Audit Your Writing/Practice And Check What Types Of Practice You’re Doing
Here’s a simple but eye opening exercise you can do in the next 7 days:
Use a spreadsheet. Or create a table in Word or Pages or whatever word processor you use.
Multiple columns.
First column is date/time.
Second column is what writing you did.
Third column is how long you did it for.
Fourth column has only two answers: was this planned? (Y or N.)
Fifth column has four possible answers: R (for random practice), I (for improvement practice) or M for (maintenance practice) or W (just writing).
Review your spreadsheet after days of tracking to see what you find?
My guess is that the majority of writers will find that the majority of their writings have a ‘W’ in that fifth column. That’s fine if your writing is achieving what you want it to achieve or your writing for fun.
If your writing is a part of your business in someway….it’s a problem.
But.
Having identified a problem is the first step towards making improvements and getting better.
#5 A Simple Exercise You Can Do Today
My first mentor - Sean D’Souza - often says that talent (or skill) is aquired as much by eliminating mistakes as it is by learning new skills.
I understand what he’s saying and agree with him to a point. In a future issue of PTWS I’ll talk about ‘fixing mistakes’ from the perspective of an elite bass player and how it pertains to writing. (My definition of elite here - in the top ten in the world in his particular discipline.)
Most writers have basic holes in their writing technique they are either not aware of, or are aware of, and ‘fix’ in the editing stage of their writing.
Here’s the exercise:
Take around 250 words of your writing at random.
Copy and paste them into the Hemingway Editor.
Hemingway Editor will come up with suggestions on the right hand side. Like the following screenshot - you should take a screenshot of your suggestions:
Repeat this with at least 10 more random samples of similar length, taking screenshots of Hemingway’s recommendations.
Print out the screenshots…then put them on a table top or desktop. And look for that patterns.
Pick the item that occurs the most and create exercises to fix it.
This is something you can start doing today that will improve your writing.
#6 The Ride Out
Improvement doesn’t come from practice, it comes from improvement practice.
Just writing more articles, or more tweet theads, or more LinkedIn Posts, or whatever your main kind of writing is, won’t lead to improvement. That’s maintenance practice at best. One day I’ll support that statement with an article on “the maths of Stephen King.”
If you want to improve your writing, identify areas where you are currently weak and devise exercises to fix those areas. Even 15 minutes a day of those kind of exercises will compound and put you streets ahead of your contemporaries.
Plus one other benefit: your first drafts will be cleaner and need less editing. Meaning you can write more! Or pay less to your editor (if you use one). For freelance writers of any kind, this should be a no-brainer.
Practicing The Write Stuff Issue #6
In Issue #7 of PTWS, we’re going to look at Part 2 of The Three Zone Learning Model (See also issue #5.)