The Oxford Dictionaries Blog (which you might never have otherwise encountered, I admit; but look at you, learning stuff on a Friday!) posted an interesting item the other day on early 19th century British novelist Jane Austen and the (forgotten?) art of letter writing. Though her father had an expansive library, Oxford says, it is unlikely that Austen owned a published letter writing guide of a type that would have been popular into the 1840s:

…in genteel families such as hers letter writing skills were usually handed down within the family. “I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper what one would say to the same person by word of mouth,” Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra on 3 January 1801, adding, “I have been talking to you almost as fast as I could the whole of this letter.” But I don’t think George Austen’s library contained any English grammars either. He did teach boys at home, to prepare them for further education, but he taught them Latin, not English.

The post also highlights Austen’s humble beginnings as a writer:

Jane Austen didn’t learn to write from a book; she learnt to write just by practicing, from a very early age on. Her Juvenilia, a fascinating collection of stories and tales she wrote from around the age of twelve onward, have survived, in her own hand, as evidence of how she developed into an author. Her letters, too, illustrate this. She is believed to have written some 3,000 letters, only about 160 of which have survived, most of them addressed to Cassandra. The first letter that has come down to us reads a little awkwardly: it has no opening formula, contains flat adverbs – “We were so terrible good as to take James in our carriage”, which she would later employ to characterize her so-called “vulgar” characters – and even has an unusual conclusion: “yours ever J.A.”.

Like all of us, the first woman to write a romantic comedy was a terrible writer to begin. But practice, practice, practice–whether to communicate practically with friends and family using the technology of the day, or to refine diction, grammar, and critical thinking–is the key to becoming a better writer.

That’s why I blog, more often than not, to become a better writer.