When I was in college, a professor of Victorian prose encouraged us to copy passages of Mill, Ruskin, Arnold, Pugin, and others to learn "how to write," in his words. I imagine that, for that beloved man at the end of his career 45 years ago, we would benefit from writing more like those authors. For those of us who took him up on his challenge, we learned something different: how to put sentences together in ways we'd never imagined.

I can still remember trying to carry a sentence from Ruskin from his page to mind in memory, and realizing that I was rearranging my sense of structure and clarity by doing so. I hope never to write like a Victorian, but I hope to write as clearly as they tried to.

Perhaps that's the same kind of hope that led Didion to copy Hemingway, not to reproduce his style but some of his effects.

I haven't thought about that Victorian prose class in many years. Thanks for your insightful piece that called it to mind.