Get Hired the WRITE Way

Wow, I stumbled upon this great article when I felt absolutely uninspired how to write my resume and interview script. Following are excerpts from “Freedom to Write – Through Imitation” by Donna Gorrell

1. Learn by observing and replicating the writing of good authors as a means of internalizing a sense of good writing. Many teachers are using imitation in their classrooms, finding it to be effective in teaching form and sense of language while encouraging creativity.
2. It is part of the writing process. For writers imitate other writers, just as painters imitate other painters, violinists imitate other violinists, golfers imitate other golfers.
3. Most of you have been unsuccessful in applying half-remembered rules from a grammar book to improve your writing. The grammar book can’t be internalized so it doesn’t work in reality. You still lack a sense of form at all levels – word, sentence, paragraph, and entire work. Worse, you worry about making mistakes and think more about form than about what you want to say. Grammar hinders expression.
4. For good writers, a sense of form is almost unconscious. Basic writers spend too much time thinking about how to spell their words and phrase their sentences – ideas get lost.
5. One solution is to throw form out the window and encourage free expression of ideas. Through free writing, basic writers become fluent writers, but still unskilled.
6. Imitation offers you a way to learn form and structure while generating and finding expression for your own ideas. Imitation lends you a form and frees creativity.
7. Imitation is an innate ability that psychologists still don’t quite understand today: how learning naturally occurs by imitation. Imitation is built into human species much as language is built into children. Children don’t need to be taught on how to imitate. As we grow up to become adults, we somehow lose the ability.
8. Internalized imitation. With use, imitated forms become internalized, incorporated into your cognitive system. By imitation, you internalize a model and develop a sense of good writing that’s extremely complex and hard to explain. It’s amazing that you just know what good writing should look like. 
9. Writers read. Speakers listen. Read like a writer. Listen like a speaker. To achieve closed loop learning, input and output need to happen simultaneously, output helps input to sink in, register in a learner’s permanent memory, and ultimately internalized.
10. You pick up not only meaning but form in which that meaning is expressed: how to put words and phrases and sentences together. Most of the time, this process of assimilation and imitation is unconscious. As my driving instructor told me: pay attention to where you are going (the goal) not the way to get there (the process), your mind and body will naturally coordinate and adjust to help you get there (achieve the goal).
11. Meaning and form develop hand in hand. Imitation is not restricting but encouraging creativity. The satisfaction of knowing how to put words down on a piece of paper keeps ideas flowing. It is internalization of structures that unlocks our powers and sets us free to be creative, original, and ultimately effective.
12. Applied to writing, imitation means that we do not need to invent a new form every time we want to express an idea. We all know that trial-and-error writing depends too much on reinventing the wheel. It’s not only frustrating but kills creativity. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Nothing is said that has not been said before. We just need to find it. Much more efficient is to ask: how has this idea been expressed before by other people? And get some of the best examples instantly.
13. Basic writers have not internalized the model of expression, their flow of ideas is blocked in the absence of a form for expressing them. You suffer from the writer’s block because you struggle with the form. Imitation enters the process at right place right time and constantly enables the form. AI-Enabled Writer’s Assistant provides basic writers with a combined, simultaneous reading and writing experience to demonstrate the best ways that similar ideas have been expressed by other people before. It’s how real learning happens.
14. Imitation is not plagiarism. Originals and copies exist side by side reputably in our world. In fact, originals exist to be imitated, and the very term original implies the possibility of imitations. Originals are both models of how something can be done and challenges for improvement. The creator of an imitation competes with the original, trying to improve on it.
15. Imitation is a simple but powerful ability that allows us to write by examining how good writers write. Imitate so you can be different. Imitation exists for the sake of variation. You will become more original as you engage in creative imitation. Imitation is a shortcut to learning styles and structures, giving you a wider choice of alternatives to express your ideas.
16. Imitation is problem solving, it makes use of experience – one’s own and that of others – to find solutions. You need a model, a guide, a shortcut through endless trials and errors. It leads you to see real time highly relevant writing, that you have seen but failed to notice before – simple, natural, intuitive – and write with an easy style almost effortlessly!