---
title: "Deliberate Practice: A Universal Learning Method"
author: "Dominik Lukeš"
book_id: "deliberate-practice"
licence: "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
source_url: "https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/"
reader_url: "https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice"
sections: 21
sections_with_text: 21
---
# Deliberate Practice: A Universal Learning Method
By Dominik Lukeš.
The key limit to fluent performance is working memory. Discover how to overcome these limits and master any skill through structured, reflective practice.
Licence: [Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).
Source: https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/
## Contents
- [About This Guide](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/agent/deliberate-practice/chapters/about-this-guide.md) · [reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=about-this-guide)
- [Working Memory Limitations](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/agent/deliberate-practice/chapters/working-memory-limitations.md) · [reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=working-memory-limitations)
- [Fluency as Target](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/agent/deliberate-practice/chapters/fluency.md) · [reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=fluency)
- [Schemas & Chunks](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/agent/deliberate-practice/chapters/schemas.md) · [reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=schemas)
- [Two Kinds of Memory](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/agent/deliberate-practice/chapters/memory-types.md) · [reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=memory-types)
- [Key Points on Memory](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/agent/deliberate-practice/chapters/key-points-memory.md) · [reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=key-points-memory)
- [Practice for Performance](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/agent/deliberate-practice/chapters/practice-performance.md) · [reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=practice-performance)
- [Avoiding Task Misalignment](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/agent/deliberate-practice/chapters/task-alignment.md) · [reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=task-alignment)
- [Four Approaches to Practice](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/agent/deliberate-practice/chapters/approaches.md) · [reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=approaches)
- [Practice in Different Disciplines](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/agent/deliberate-practice/chapters/disciplines.md) · [reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=disciplines)
- [Timing of Practice](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/agent/deliberate-practice/chapters/timing.md) · [reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=timing)
- [Identifying Need for Practice](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/agent/deliberate-practice/chapters/reflection-identifying-need.md) · [reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=reflection-identifying-need)
- [Techniques for Deciding What to Practice](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/agent/deliberate-practice/chapters/deciding-what-to-practice.md) · [reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=deciding-what-to-practice)
- [Methods for Improving Repetition](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/agent/deliberate-practice/chapters/improving-repetition.md) · [reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=improving-repetition)
- [Techniques for Reflection](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/agent/deliberate-practice/chapters/reflection-feedback.md) · [reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=reflection-feedback)
- [Dealing with Emotions](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/agent/deliberate-practice/chapters/emotions.md) · [reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=emotions)
- [Overcoming Working Memory](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/agent/deliberate-practice/chapters/limitations-working-memory.md) · [reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=limitations-working-memory)
- [Metaphors of Writing](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/agent/deliberate-practice/chapters/metaphors-writing.md) · [reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=metaphors-writing)
- [Reviews of Writing Programs](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/agent/deliberate-practice/chapters/reviews-coaching.md) · [reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=reviews-coaching)
- [License](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/agent/deliberate-practice/chapters/license.md) · [reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=license)
- [Reader Guide](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/agent/deliberate-practice/chapters/reader-guide.md) · [reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=reader-guide)
---
> Section 1 of 21 · About This Guide · id `about-this-guide` · [read in the reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=about-this-guide)
# About This Guide
## What is this about?
Standard advice on learning often fails the people who need it most. We are frequently told that to practice we must spend many hours repeating the same thing many times and that this will eventually lead to mastery, but rarely are we told **how** to spend those hours. Many dedicated learners simply repeat the same mistakes for years rather than correcting them. They hit plateaus and eventually give up, assuming they simply lack the necessary talent. This guide addresses that specific gap.
Most existing literature on "Deliberate Practice" focuses on elite performers—chess grandmasters, Olympic athletes, or concert violinists—who have access to world-class coaches and established training programs. That advice is useless if you are trying to improve your academic writing alone in a library or learning a foreign language without a tutor. I wanted to translate the principles of high-performance psychology into a practical toolkit for anybody.
> This guide is an attempt to democratize expertise. It takes the methods used by expert performers working with world-class coaches and adapts them for individuals working on their own and directing their own learning in contexts where resources are scarce.
## Who this is for
This book is for anyone currently stuck on a plateau. You might be an academic writer struggling to turn complex thoughts into clear text, a language learner who understands grammar rules but freezes in conversation, or a musician who can play the notes but lacks fluency. You do not need to be aiming for a world record; you just need to be aiming for *better*.
It is specifically designed for self-directed learners. If you do not have a coach standing over your shoulder correcting your form, you need to learn to be your own coach. You need to learn how to diagnose your own bottlenecks, generate your own feedback loops, and structure your own curriculum.
## What you will find inside
This is not a theoretical treatise on neuroscience, though we will touch on how the brain processes information. It is a manual for action. Specifically, this guide covers:
- **The mechanics of working memory:** Understanding why you get overwhelmed and how building "mental representations" (chunks) is the only way to bypass biological limits.
- **Task alignment:** Why you are likely practicing the wrong thing (like practicing "recognition" when you actually need "recall") and how to fix your posture.
- **Concrete techniques:** Seven specific methods to vary your repetition, including back-chaining, speed variation, and artificial constraints.
- **The emotional grind:** An honest discussion about the boredom and frustration of practice, and strategies to manage the emotional weight of learning.
My goal is to move you from "mindless repetition" to "reflective practice." By the end of this guide, you will have a personal roadmap to break through your current limits and achieve fluency.
---
> Section 2 of 21 · Working Memory Limitations · id `working-memory-limitations` · [read in the reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=working-memory-limitations)
# Working Memory and How to Overcome Its Limitations Through Practice
## Summary of key facts about working memory
1. Working memory is what we can keep active in the mind while we perform mental operations.
2. There are only a limited number of chunks of information we can keep in working memory at one time (between 4 and 10). When new ones are added, old ones are pushed out.
3. The size of the chunks is not limited. In fact, sometimes making them bigger makes it easier, particularly, if we increase their size by making them more meaningful to us.
## What is working memory and why it matters for good performance
Working memory is the small mental buffer you use to keep things on top of mind so that you can do something with them. You need working memory when you do mental calculations, compare ideas, recognise faces, drive a car, or when you write a sentence. Without it, we would be too slow at doing any of these things.
There are many things we don’t know for certain about working memory but we are sure, it is very limited. It can only hold about 7 discrete items at once (some people say it’s even less but definitely no more than 10).
A good simple example is writing down a phone number someone is dictating to you. Unless you focus, you can usually only do it a few digits at a time and nobody can do a whole 10 digit phone number. Just remembering each digit individually and then writing them down one by one is impossible without some mental tricks. And it’s these sort of tricks that we can learn from.
The very simplest mental trick is to chunk the numbers. So instead of putting **2 3 5 6 7 8 9 1 9 3 6** into your working memory buffer one by one, you can do **2356 7789 1936**. Now you only have three chunks in working memory. This is easier but the chunks don’t mean anything, so it will still be a challenge. So instead, you can decide to chunk the numbers in a way that has some meaning. **23** (how old your cousin is) **5677** (a house number) **89** (number of a road you travel on) **1936** (date in history). All of a sudden, it’s much easier to quickly put the numbers into your working memory and keep them there. (The world record holder can use this approach to memorise 514 digits in 5 minutes.)
So what we did was:
1. Create chunks
2. Make the chunks bigger and richer by adding meaning
This seems like a paradox. If working memory is limited, how can we make it easier to think when we put more in? That is the second thing we are sure about when it comes to working memory. Even though the number of chunks we can keep in it is limited, the size of the chunks is not. Chunks, by the way, is the technical term in the research, so we will use this here, as well.
## Working memory in practice
How does this work in practice? We use working memory for much more than just writing down phone numbers. It is involved in everything we do. Working memory is fundamental to speaking, reading and writing. Here is another example. Take this English sentence:
> Books are often very expensive.
>
It probably took you less than a second to read and understand. (Assuming you are a native speaker who does not have dyslexia or some other difficulty that slows down processing.)
Let’s take a similar sentence in another language. Let’s say Czech. You probably don’t speak Czech but, it should be very easy to translate, if I give you all the words first.
Here is an alphabetical list of the four words that will appear in the sentence.
| jsou | are |
| --- | --- |
| knihy | books |
| staré | old |
| támhle | over there |
Now, how long does it take you to read and understand this sentence?
> Staré knihy jsou támhle.
>
Probably at least 10 seconds. Why? You have to look up every single word in the list and then put them together in your mind. But all those words are unfamiliar and they take up a lot of space in your working memory. So it is possible that even after you put them all together you have no mental capacity to do anything else with that sentence. Such as make it into a question by swapping the verb and the subject. It is very simple:
> Jsou staré knihy támhle?
>
But you probably couldn’t do it without a lot of effort. What are some strategies you could use to translate and transform the sentence. There are essentially three:
(1) First, you would probably want to remove everything else that may be taking up space in your working memory. This means focusing just on the sentence. Removing visual distractions such as not looking anywhere else, minimising other audio input such as turning down music, remove thoughts of other things by trying to focus on just the task at hand.
(2) Second, you would want to offload some of the load from your working memory somewhere else. The best way to do that is to write down each individual word as you translate it on a piece of paper. And when I ask you to switch the subject and verb, you may want to circle the two words that constitute the subject (old books) and underline the verb (jsou).
But none of these methods are sustainable in the long term. You could not translate very many sentences doing this. And you would never be able to have a conversation in the language. Looking up every word of a sentence in a dictionary is not how you speak, read or write a language. So this leads us to the next strategy that lies at the heart of this programme.
(3) Third, combine the words into meaningful chunks in your mind. You could try to find some surface similarities to create a mnemonic devices. For example, *staré* sounds kind of like *starry* and you could associate *knihy* with *knights* who go *high*. But this is very hard to do quickly and only works for recalling the words, not doing something with them.
(4) So you are left with the only other option and that is to practice the language. This would involve repeating different combinations of words many times to create chunks that you can use in working memory. But it would also require that you think about how the words are put together and also about the ways of trying to learn them. And, most importantly, you would need to make sure that what you are saying has real meaning to you.
This has been called **deliberate practice** and it lies at the heart of the Writing Boot Up. Deliberate practice is like any other practice. You repeat actions until you can perform them with ease. But the core of deliberate practice is that this repetition involves focus and reflection. And these are aimed explicitly at helping you overcome the limitations of working memory by developing ‘bigger chunks’ and storing them for later use as mental representations.
## Reflective repetition as a way of overcoming working memory limitations and performance plateaus
To get better at anything, we need to practice. We cannot just think about how to do something, we have to try it first. And usually we have to repeat it many times before we get better at it. Just think about how long it took you to learn to drive. There are many steps to just getting started and simply thinking about them is not enough. You have to practice in small chunks and slowly it becomes easy.
But very soon, we stop getting better no matter how many times we repeat something. This means we reach a plateau. To break through a plateau, we need to reflect on what it is that we’re doing, what gets in the way and what else we could try to improve with the next round of repetitions. As we reach close to the limit of what is possible, more reflection and more focused repetition is needed. As you get closer to being the best you can be, you may have to do a lot of this for relatively small gains. But initially, adding reflection to repetition can help us make great strides.
To summarise the key principle behind this approach, we can say:
We get better at many things after doing them a few times. But after a while we stop improving. So we have to be more focused on how we repeat things. It is best if what we are trying to learn has a nice programme of step by step improvement we can follow such as Couch to 5K. But if there is not one, you can still improve by focusing on what you are practicing.
The key principle behind our reflection should be:
---
> Section 3 of 21 · Fluency as Target · id `fluency` · [read in the reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=fluency)
# Fluency as the Target of Practice
## Why you should target fluency in practice
Being able to keep more in working memory is essential to fluent and accurate performance. Accuracy is self-evident but people rarely think about fluency. Fluency means that you can perform the action quickly enough not to get stuck and loose track of what you’re trying to do.
We most often talk about fluency when it comes to speaking a language. When we say ‘She is fluent in Swahili’ we mean that she can have a conversation with someone without constantly stopping and thinking about how to say something. Everybody who’s tried to learn a second language knows what it feels like when you don’t have enough fluency. You feel like a fool because you can never say what you want when you most need it.
But fluency is very important to any performance. Whether it is speaking, writing, reading, playing a musical instrument, driving or even editing, you need to be able to do it quickly enough to get where you are going.
## Lessons from dyslexia about the importance of fluency
One of the more well-known learning difficulties that causes problems with reading and writing is dyslexia. This is often thought about as misspelling words. But most people do not realise that by far the biggest impact of dyslexia is on fluency.
In fact, dyslexia is defined as a phonological processing limitation that causes problems with “fluent and accurate reading and writing”. What this means is that a dyslexic reader or writer will be so slow in decoding individual words that by the time they get to the end of the sentence, they don’t know what it’s about. And working memory deficit is one of the most common issues people with dyslexia face.
Dyslexia is a neurological feature but even people without dyslexia feel similar effects when they are in a situation when their working memory is put under stress. In other words, their ability to write or read fluently is diminished and often their accuracy suffers, as well. There are many things that put stress on your working memory but speaking or reading in a foreign language would come top of the list. And for most people ‘academic writing’ often feels like a foreign language.
## Fluency vs unconscious competence
It would be a mistake to think of fluent performance as not having to think about what we’re doing. Many people have heard of the four stages of competence model ([Four stages of competence model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence)) in which you progress through these four stages when developing any skill:
1. Unconscious incompetence: Not knowing we can’t do something
2. Conscious incompetence: Realising we can’t do something
3. Conscious competence: Becoming aware of being able to do something
4. Unconscious competence: Doing something without thinking
This is a useful guide to thinking about the process of learning but there is a great danger of misinterpreting the final stage as being ‘so good at something’ we can do it without thinking about it. In fact, the original author warned against this very stage as being a symptom that people will stop improving.
The final stage of competence will feel like you can do something without paying conscious attention but that’s only because your working memory is not being constantly swamped. But the aim should not be to be able to do something without thinking but to but to be able to do it because we can think with bigger chunks.
The chunks in your working memory are not closed off blocks, they have internal structure and being able to bring this structure out is essential when encountering a new situation or when something goes wrong. An expert performer must not only be able to something but also to notice problems and recover from them. A musician may play a wrong note, an actor may have to respond to a disruption from the audience, a driver may have to deal with a non-responsive break. Dealing with all of those situations requires being able to take apart and recombine the chunks at high speed.
This is extremely relevant to academic writing because it is important for a writer to not just string together chunks academic-sounding language but also to say something with it. In fact, academic writers have to paraphrase what others are saying. They also have to be able to edit what they wrote which again requires conscious attention. Writing requires thinking, but thinking fluently.
This is why practice also requires thinking, focus and reflection. Which brings us to the next section.
---
> Section 4 of 21 · Schemas & Chunks · id `schemas` · [read in the reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=schemas)
# Schemas and chunks: What needs to go in your memory
## What you actually need to “remember”
Contrary to the impression you may get if you read popular books by cognitive psychologists, we know almost nothing about memory. We know quite a few things about what happens when people try to remember and how they forget, but exactly what happens in the brain when people try to memorise something is a complete mystery.
The most common way in which most people think about memory is as some sort of storage into which you reach with your mind and retrieve what you are looking for. But the truth is, we just don’t know if that is what memory is like. There are some aspects of memory that behave like storage, but there are others that are very different.
Pretty much everything that we say about memory is some kind of metaphor. Metaphors can be incredibly useful but we should be careful about drawing inferences from them. Here, I will use the metaphor of an inventory of mental schemas from which we retrieve chunks onto a sort of mental shelf where we can combine them into a useful product. But that is all it is - a metaphor.
The storage metaphor breaks down very often. Memory simply does not seem to behave like a storage of objects in many ways. For example, It does not seem to run out of space in a straightforward way. The more we put in, and the more we make connections between what we had placed there, the more seems to be able to fit in. Also, we can often retrieve things from the back of this metaphorical storage more easily than from the front. That is not how storage spaces work in the literal sense. So we must be incredibly careful about what we say when it’s time for things like long-term and short-term memory.
## Mental representations or embodied mental schemas
While we know very little about the exact nature of memory, we know even less about what is actually stored in there. We do know what the things that come out look like: Words, memories, ideas, images, episodes, etc. But it is pretty unlikely, they are just stored somewhere in a neuron in a brain for us to retrieve. We wouldn’t know where to start finding the boundaries.
The problem with memory as storage is that we have no easy way to explain how those memories get into working memory. And we also do not know how the sort of practice we do, would put them in the storage in a way that is actually useful when we need them. What sort of things am I pulling out of my head as I am writing this sentence? What did it take for me to put them there? English is not my first language, so it took a long time to learn all the structures, but I also had to learn to type fast enough to do it, the rules of spelling and so on. Individually, it is a long list of things, yet, they seemingly just happen. We do not have a very good theory of what is happening here other than just waving a hand to say that we’re retrieving items.
One way of resolving this problem is thinking about what is in our brain as an inventory of embodied mental schemas. This may seem like an unnecessary diversion but it is actually important as we contemplate what we practice and why. But feel free to skip this section.
We need to answer three questions:
1. Why schemas instead of simple units
2. Why embodied instead of just plain concepts
3. Why an inventory instead of some structured storage
### Why schemas
We tend to think that the words in our head are very simple. But they are not - they come with a lot of underlying knowledge. Adjectives are a useful example. We take the colour green. When I something important is happening when I say ‘green leaf’ or a ‘green car’. When I tear apart a leaf, I expect to still see the colour green. Yet, when I open the door of a green car, I expect to see no green at all. Green cars are green on the outside, leaves all the way through. To combine the colour green with the word car is very different from combining it with the word leaf.
What comes into play is our knowledge of the world. Leaves are green through and through, and cars are green only when painted. This is just one tiny thing about leaves and cars, yet, it would take pages to adequately describe it. But we understand both instantly and make the right inferences. So, a good way of thinking about this is as having relatively schematic outlines of things in our head that we can then use instantly but fitting multiple ones together into one.
The same goes for nouns, verbs and other things. All books are different but I don’t have a problem recognising all of them as book. Everybody runs differently (people, animals), yet I can immediately recognise something as running. So, what is in my head doesn’t make sense as a perfect picture, it is some sort of an outline.
Even grammar rules are such outlines. I don’t have a rule in my head that tells me Noun + Verb make a sentence (a dog runs). I have a schema that may look something like this: [[nouny thing][verby things]]. These schemas can get quite large but it seems we are able to use them. (There is a whole theory behind this called construction or cognitive grammar, but that is not too relevant, here.)
This is very useful because, when I practice, my aim is to create ever larger schemas that I can instantaneously combine as I perform. It makes no sense to develop structures that are too specific.
Let’s take this joke by the Comedian Mitch Hedberg: “I like escalators. They never break. They just become stairs.” What sort of information would you have to have stored in your head, how would you retrieve it, and combine it to understand this joke? You could perhaps come up with a way to explain one such joke. But there are thousands like this in English alone. In some way it is easier to imagine that we have schemas that we simply overlay on top of one another and a new image emerges. Like to prints on semi transparent paper.
Calling up such schemas and overlaying them on top of one another is what chunking inside working memory is. Or at least, it is a useful way to think about it that way. We actually have no idea how it happens in practice. If, instead, we think of this as computing some sort of sequence of instructions, we run into the problem is that that is what working memory is for. But we need something to present to working memory - and those are chunks composed out of embodied mental schemas.
### Why embodied
Why not just talk about concepts we have in our head? Ericsson calls these things mental representations. But these things are neither pure representations nor purely mental. When we learn things, we involve our bodies in all sorts of ways.
Our bodies give us the basic framework for understanding spatial relations and all the other concepts derived from them like: inside, excluded, overarching, etc.
But that’s not really what matters here. What is really important is that most of the things we are learning with deliberate practice have a bodily component. When we write, we use our fingers and hands. But also our backs and our backsides. We experience tiredness, we occupy the space around us, we hear noises, etc. All of those are also involved in reading. When we learn a foreign language, we gesture, move our mouths, etc.
Of course, some skills require less action with our bodies than others. Running or lifting weights is mostly a matter of the body (although surprisingly also a very mental exercise) and chess a lot less (although surprisingly it has a bodily component). Some other less physical disciplines still require a of bodily involvement. Music is very much a bodily exercise.
Even seemingly purely mental skills like doing maths have this bodily component. Doing mathematics cannot be done without putting things on paper, standing around whiteboards, etc. Both chess and maths can be done in the head only but only up to a point and only after involving the body for a long time.
And we do know that when we practice, to develop these skills, we have to involve the body. So, it makes sense to assume that they are a part of the schemas. And we can improve how useful they are to us if we incorporate our bodies into them even more.
We can think of the embodied schemas as the sort of gestures we perform to solve normal problems. When we feel a mosquito on our face, we automatically touch the spot with out hand. It is an incredibly complicated gesture, but we do it automatically. Our aim is to develop such mental schemas that they start to feel to us as easy and natural as touch a spot on our face.
### Why inventory
These schemas are not all alike. They vary in richness, some are static, some are dynamic, some are extremely specific and others very general. It is not clear how many we have and how many we need. But if we tried to make a list, we’d probably end up with millions. This sounds extreme but that is what Psyc project found when they tried to document knowledge in a way that would represent it to a computer.
So the question is, how do we keep them all in our head and in our bodies? The short answer is, we don’t know. But a good way is to think of them as an inventory of good available for sale in a large supermarket. There is no definite best way in which they are organised, their place changes based on the time of day or customer demand, some are more and some are less readily accessible.
We are constantly replenishing and refreshing that inventory but ultimately we have to spend money, effort, time and resources to keep it full and organised. What it is not is a box where we simply put one thing after another.
Of course, in some ways it is more like a giant warehouse than an inventory, we cannot see it all at once and sometimes things get lost, they fade or expire beyond usefulness.
And in some ways it is like neither of these things. There are no practical limits on how much we seem to be able to store and it is almost as easy to get to things at the back as it is at the front.
But nevertheless, it is useful to use a metaphor like inventory to help us.
## More about chunks and mental representations
Fluent performance breaks down when the limits of working memory are reached. We can think of the limits roughly as a fixed number of chunks of information. And the only way to overcome the limit in the moment is to chunk information together into bigger chunks because there does not seem to be a limit on the size or richness of those chunks.
We know that it takes reflective and purposeful practice to develop the ability to work with these chunks. But a big question remains. What are the chunks like and where are they stored? The short answer is we don’t know. But one way to think about them (inspired by Anders Ericsson) is as ‘mental representations’.
Unfortunately, Ericsson or other researchers have not really had much to say about the nature of these representations. We just know something like them exists because we know when people focus on them, their performance improves. So provisionally, we can think of them as some structures in the mind that are available to working memory without any retrieval effort (look and know knowledge). This makes them different from more encyclopaedic knowledge we often have to work hard to retrieve from memory.
Mental representations is an unfortunate term for two reasons:
1. It implies that they are concepts to be learned about whereas they are structures to acquire through practice.
2. It implies that only ‘mind’ things are involved whereas these representations are really embodied. We can think of them perhaps even better as mental gestures.
But we need a term to distinguish between the chunks that we use during performance. And the long-term structures that we are developing through practice. The reason for this is that we can also create ad-hoc chunks (such as when remembering a phone number) which is different from the chunks we develop through practice.
## What do ‘mental representations look like’?
We must not confuse mental representations with analytic categories. Analytic categories are the domain of conceptual learning. But mental representations are essential for procedural learning. And paradoxically, they are not always the same. With analytic categories, our aim is to have an accurate understanding of something, with mental representations, we are looking to develop fluent performance.
We can best illustrate it on the difference between knowing about the grammar of a language and knowing how to speak a language. Native speakers have no problem constructing complex sentences at fluent conversational speed but when you ask them how those sentences are put together, they usually give an answer that is different from that of a grammarian.
They are able to speak fluently by recombining chunks of language, rather than putting individual words together according to the rules of grammar. And these chunks are often very different from the categories found in a grammar book. For example, beginner readers often benefit from decomposing longer words into their parts. They learn that ‘teacher’ is the result of putting together ‘teach’ and “-er”. This makes it easier to read and write. But they may also use that same principle to learn how to read the word ‘corner’, even though ‘corner’ is not the result of putting together ‘corn’ + ‘-er’.
Mental representations that we develop to assist in fluent performance are often different from the conceptual representations of the same thing. Sometimes this is a small idiosyncrasy of the individual, but sometimes it is a necessary stage of development. Complete beginners in any field are often taught through great oversimplification.
This has important implications for learning.
1. It is not always necessary to start ‘at the bottom’ of a conceptual hierarchy.
2. It is not always necessary to learn ‘all the basics’ first.
For example, it is possible to learn read or write a language without learning to speak it first. You may need some basics of pronunciation to make it easier to sound out words, but you don’ have to take a whole conversational course. And equally, it is possible to learn to write an academic paper before learning to write a letter to a friend.
Our practice should be aimed at the demands of the task we are trying to develop fluency in, not at being able to replicate how the task is described in theory. And it may not always be immediately obvious what the demands of the task are or even what the task itself is.
For example, many people use gamified apps for language learning. They are motivated by rewards, positions on leaderboards, competition with friends. But this means that the task they end up practicing is succeeding at the game. They optimise their mental representations towards that task and become very good at it. But this very often does not translate into being able to speak.
Unless the practice is always closely linked to actual performance, success in practice will deceive us into thinking that we are improving at the thing we are trying to practice. We are improving but at the wrong task. We are getting better at succeeding in the practice task and that success may have very different needs than succeeding at the real task.
That’s why, it is essential that we get real feedback from real situations as soon as possible. We need to link the components we are practicing in with the larger context of performance. Often, ‘actually doing it’ may be the only solution. Athletes often perform better on courses where they had competed before. But this is not realistic in most situations, which is why visualisation or even verbal rehearsal is such an important part of practice.
In other words, dealing with the environment is a part of the task which is why it is important to practice in the context of performance. Practicing for an exam is best done under exam conditions. Practicing for a musical performance is best done with an audience. And so on.
There is a joke about a jazz musician who was approached by a fan after a great performance. The fan was shocked when they saw the musician was drunk. “How were you able to play so well when you’re drunk”, the fan asked. “Well, that’s because I practice drunk.” replied the musician. The lesson here is not about alcohol but about the importance of practicing for the actual task required for fluent performance.
---
> Section 5 of 21 · Two Kinds of Memory · id `memory-types` · [read in the reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=memory-types)
# Two kinds of memory and two kinds of retrieval
## Two kinds of memory or knowledge
People talk about two kinds of learning or even two kinds of knowledge:
1. **Conceptual knowledge:** understanding definitions, concepts, rules, or principles
2. **Procedural knowledge:** being able to perform activities such as solving a math equation, applying the right grammar rule in the correct context
You can acquire conceptual knowledge by reading, listening to lectures and then thinking about it or even better discussing it with colleagues. With simple enough concepts, you can even learn something conceptually in a few minutes.
But procedural knowledge can only be acquired through practice and over time. It is relatively easy to learn a list of words and a few rules for using them. But when you try to actually say a sentence in a real context, that kind of knowledge seems completely out of reach. Your working memory simply is not big enough to retrieve the words, put endings on them and put them in the right order while also thinking about what you want to say or worrying about what the other person thinks of your accent.
The biggest mistake people make is to assume that just because they understand some concept, they can use it in actual performance. In general, people almost always practice too little and learn the rules too much. They value understanding over the ability to do something with that understanding.
And things get even worse. That is because conceptual knowledge actually relies on procedural knowledge. As the concepts get more complicated, it becomes more difficult to just keep all aspects of the ideas in your head. We learn concepts to do something with them. But if we can’t hold enough of the concept in our working memory at the same time as another one, even a simple thing like comparison is out of reach.
So it is worthwhile to insert little moments of practice even into conceptual learning. Particularly when encountering one of these:
- Abstract concepts
- Acronyms
- Terms, foreign words, names
- Equations
- Variables
- Functions
| Conceptual | Procedural |
| --- | --- |
| 1. Developing mental maps of the area of competence
2. Is developed through engagement with content such as guides, lessons, etc. | 1. Developing fluency of performance in the area of competence
2. Relies on ability to perceive and act based on the perception
3. Is developed through a feedback loop of repetition and reflection |
## Two kinds of retrieval: “Look and know” vs “Look up and know”
When we talk about conceptual or procedural knowledge, we always think of it as something that is stored somewhere in your brain or in our muscles (or a combination of both). But the actual question that is of interest to us here is how we retrieve those pieces of knowledge from this storage into working memory.
From this perspective we can differentiate between two types of memory retrieval based on the way we get its contents from wherever it is stored in a dormant state into our working memory where we can do something with it. They are:
1. Look and know
2. Look up and know
### Look and know retrieval
**Look and know retrieval of knowledge** (or skill) is at the very foundation of our existence. As you go through the world, you look at things and you immediately know what they are. Objects, people’s faces, words you see or hear. When you need them, they just appear in your working memory for you to be able to think with them. They are almost integrated into your body. You want to pick up an object and you reach out and take it. You want to say a sentence about it and you just do it.
### Look up and know retrieval
**Look up and know** is the kind of knowledge (or skill) retrieval that requires effort to make knowledge available for thinking with. It is like looking up a word in a dictionary before you say it. And that process takes time and mental energy which takes up a space in your working memory. You can do fewer things with knowledge that you have to look up before you can do something with it.
These two types are similar but not exactly the same as the conceptual vs procedural distinction.
## Table comparing different types of knowledge and retrieval
| **** | **Conceptual:** Look up and know | **Procedural:** Look and know |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Ease of retrieval into working memory | Needs to be retrieved from long-term storage. | Is immediately available for cognitive operations. |
| **Cognitive demands** | · High demand on working memory.
· Can only be retrieved one step at a time.
· Limited ability to use for complex mental or physical operations. | · Low demand on working memory.
· Can be retrieved instantaneously.
· Can be used for complex mental or physical operations. |
| **Practical implications** | Not useful for fluent performance in most tasks with any level of complexity. | Necessary for performance but limited use for developing overall understanding. |
| **Examples** | · Recognise unfamiliar face
· Remember a word to fill in a blank
· Remember a mathematical formula | · Recognise familiar faces
· Use a word in conversation
· Use a formula to produce a result |
| **Disciplines that primarily rely on** | · History
· Grammar
· Philosophy
· Music theory
· Medical knowledge
· Computer science
· Set theory | · Speaking a language
· Coding
· Mathematics
· Engineering
· Musical performance
· Diagnostic medicine
· Surgery |
| **Acquisition** | Through engagement with content. | Through purposeful practice based on reflective repetition. |
---
> Section 6 of 21 · Key Points on Memory · id `key-points-memory` · [read in the reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=key-points-memory)
# Key points about mental representations and working memory
- The number of chunks that can be in our working memory at any one time is limited. We are not exactly sure what the exact limit is but we know there is one and that it is more less the same across the population. There is nobody with an ‘order of magnitude’ larger working memory capacity.
- There is no limit to the size of the chunks in working memory; in fact, the richer in meaning they are, the better. This is a metaphor. We do not know exactly what those chunks look like and exactly how they work. But we know enough about how people use them to be able to make this a working assumption.
- The chunks exist in our skills inventory as mental representations (I am purposely not calling this long term memory because I do not want to pollute the concept with questions of storage or form; I also do not want to limit this to something that is purely in the ‘brain’)
- Mental representations does NOT mean concepts or ideas because they may contain physical components - we can just as easily think of them as gestures.
- We can acquire mental representations through repetition and we can increase their complexity through reflective repetition. We do not know exactly how much repetition is required but we know there’s a limit to the utility of unreflective repetition.
- For certain types of knowledge or skill performance requiring a high degree of fluency for basic successl, purposeful or deliberate practice is require to develop mental representations that are amenable to chunking into working memory.
- Mental representations are not ‘monadic’ or ‘objects with clear boundaries’ - they are not black boxes to us (up to a point) and we can access their components
- **Most importantly** mental representations do not have to (and usually do not) correspond to real categories or components as identified in textbooks. For example, if thinking or ‘corner’ as being ‘corn+er’ the same way as ‘teacher’ is ‘teach+er’ is wrong at the level of linguistic description but if somebody can use it to make it easier to learn to spell ‘corner’ (as some people do), that is a perfectly fine mental representation.
---
> Section 7 of 21 · Practice for Performance · id `practice-performance` · [read in the reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=practice-performance)
# Practice for Performance
## The three tasks of performance and targets of practice
When we practice, we say that we do it to learn things. But since the target of practice is procedural performance rather than conceptual knowledge, we need to be very clear about what it is that we are trying to develop.
## **Three components of performance**
Any performance consists of three components or inputs. They all play a different role, require different schemas and different practice. Yet, they feed into each other. Each of the components can be thought of independently but usually they are very interconnected. Different disciplines and tasks with them differ in how prominent these components are within them.
The three components are:
1. Mental map
2. Perceptive eye
3. Fluent muscle
### **Mental maps**
Mental map is what allows you to orient yourself in the situation you are facing. It is your primary sense-making instrument - it governs what you focus on, what you ignore and how you solve problems or react to new situations. Sometimes they are referred to as mental model.
The mental map or model are not the same as concepts about what you are facing. They are entirely pragmatic to help you achieve what you want. Just like any maps, they are not the territory. They can be extremely simplified or even slightly wrong but they are still useful.
For example, the mental map of a situation of you reading in a room with an open window and hearing a noise outside. Your mental map tells you that the hole in the wall is letting more sound in, so you stand up and close the window.
Another example is that you come to a device with a display or with a chord leading to an electrical outlet. Your mental map tells you that such devices have ways of being turned on, so you will look for a switch.
Mental maps also help you solve problems. The mental map you have of books is that they have sequential pages and text that ends on one continues on another. When the text going from one page to next stops making sense, you will check the page number to see if somebody tore out a page.
When you are writing and you cannot think of the next word, your mental map will send you to the thesaurus and will tell you roughly where to look.
To develop mental maps, you have to combine conceptual and procedural learning. Mental maps are not ideas or definitions. They are models of the problems you are trying to solve or the task you are trying to accomplish.
### **Perceptive eye**
Simply having a map to guide you is not enough, if you cannot recognise waypoints or that you have achieved your destination. That’s why you also need an eye that can perceive what your map is orienting you towards.
Your eye can recognise multiple features of a device your map tells you can be turned on as a button.
When reading or writing, you have to be able to recognise the words and sentences as being about the thing you are writing - not just some drops of ink on a page. When speaking a language, you have to be able to hear the words as words and not just as a series of noises.
This may sound trivial because these are examples of things with which you are intimately familiar. But just try doing these things with a new language or a new device and you will soon experience what it is like to have a mental map without a perceptive eye.
You must be able to recognise things as examples of the things you have developed mental maps for. You may have a mental map that tells you to write in an academic style but that is not helpful if you cannot recognise what academic style looks like.
To develop a perceptive eye, you have to experience a lot of examples with feedback.
### **Fluent muscle**
Finally, in order to be able to achieve anything, you have to develop fluency. You have to be able to perform the task quickly enough so that it does not just dissolve into meaningless components.
The fluency very often has some bodily dimension. Writing, speaking, playing chess, playing a piano, catching a ball - all of those require some involvement of the body as part of the activity. Without fluency, the performance would be so halting as to be useless or even stop being what we intend. Playing one note and waiting 10 seconds while we remember how to play the next one is no longer playing a song.
But even in less bodily activities such as reading or doing mathematics, we still require fluency. In fact, we can think of those activities quite usefully as sort of gestures. Postures we adopt as we orient our mind towards a problem. There’s always some muscle and movement involved - turning the page, moving our head to look at a graph, positioning the page to better see it. And it would be a mistake to ignore these. They are a part of the gesture.
As we know, fluency is where working memory plays the most important role because if we overload the buffer, we stop being able to do things at a minimum speed and the performance breaks down. This happens very quickly, sometimes so quickly that we may not even bother getting started.
So, we could say that developing fluent muscle is what is needed just to get started. You don’t start playing a song until you have played the individual notes at some sort of speed with the required gaps between them. You don’t really start speaking until you’ve said a sentence and you don’t start writing until you can write a sentence (or at least a sentence-like pattern) at a time.
But it is important to remember that fluent muscle is just a metaphor for fluency. It does not have to be muscle what is involved. But it is something we can develop.
## **Disciplines and the muscle / mental map / perceptive eye balance**
Different discicplines will have a different balance of emphasis as to the elements of performance. History is very heavily focused towards the mental map balance whereas playing baseball is much more about the fluency of physical movement. But even historians have to have perceptive eyes to recognise archival documents quickly enough as relevant and fluent muscles so that they can write about it.
Perhaps the most balanced of all disciplines is musical performance. A musician has to have a finely attuned ear so that they can tell what they are hearing is good enough and they have to have quite sophisticated mental maps of the music they are playing. But above all, they require a huge amount of fluency which they spend thousands of hours developing through deliberate practice and constantly honing and maintaining.
> A musician says: if I don’t practice for a day God knows, if I don’t practice for two days, I know and if I don’t practice for three days, the audience knows. [ref]
>
Chess is a bit different from music because the fluency does not have to be as embodied and in some matches, it is less important. But in blitz Chess, the fluency of performance is essential.
Writing is in many ways somewhere between music and chess. Unlike music, we don’t have the need to peform without stopping to think but we do have to be able to compose in sufficiently large chunks to get anything done. If we wrote at the speed of chess moves, nothing would ever get written. But writing has more space for developing mental maps and perceptive eye. We have to be able to recognise different types of writing.
## **Three metaphors of how schemas get from inventory to working memory**
So, now we have established two crucial facts about performance:
1. In order to perform most tasks at a higher level, we need to operate with larger chunks in our working memory
2. To perform better, we need to practice to build up an inventory of embodied mental schemas
We can be fairly confident that this is a sufficient requirement to develop a successful programme of practice that will lead to better performance. We have examples of successful programmes that use one or both of these facts as a working assumption. But it would be very helpful for thinking about how to make the most out of these, if we had a good working theory of how we get the embodied schemas from their inventory to working memory and combine them to perform sophisticated and fluent actions.
The simple answer is we do not know. But we can come up with some useful metaphors that will help us in thinking about it and making some useful adjustments to our programme of practice. The metaphors are:
1. Computation
2. Projected overlays
3. Clay impressions
### **Computational metaphor**
I claimed that we do not know how the contents of our minds get pulled into working memory where we can use them for performance. But many people will claim we do. They are most likely to be using a version of the computational metaphor of the mind.
Many people may not have a good model of computation. The easiest way to think about it is as a series of if-then statements. If the I move my pawn to this square, my opponent will be able to take it with her rook. If the shape I’m seeing in front of me is standing on two feet, has a head with hair on top but none on their torso, I’m looking at a human being. And so on.
This is a very seductive metaphor because everybody has experienced that kind of a process in their head when they are trying to make a decision. But it is not actually very useful for learning. That is because we cannot describe all the things that need to happen computationally in this way. There are just too many computations.
In the sentence about recognising human beings, I used a lot of words. But they would also have to be computed. How do I know that what I’m seeing is a head and what I’m seeing on top of this is hair? Every single thing would have to be computed. And computations need operations like is, not, if, then and they need to work on things with clear boundaries. This works for chess boards but not much else - we also have to assume that the inputs into our computation exist as solid objects - and that is not very helpful when we try to figure our how to learn to perform quickly. Because we know that we are not explicitly making if-then statements when we recognise what we see.
Maybe our brain is doing it at some level but not at the level accessible to us - and not in a way that would be useful to performance. In fact, it would actively harm performance. So whether, the computational metaphor is useful to cognitive science or artificial intelligence or not, it is not useful for helping us think about learning to get better at performance.
For that, we can use the metaphor or a transparent overlays which is inspired by the conceptual metaphor theory which provides a sense of what schemas look like and its successor conceptual integration theory which helps us think about how we reason with them [ref - Lakoff 1987, Fauconnier and Turner 2003].
### **Projected overlays**
Imagine two semi-transparent sheets of paper (lets’ call them transparencies). These transparencies have various images drawn on them. Some are very detailed, others just outline sketches, some full of colour, others in black and white, some very sharp and others fuzzy. When you put two or more such sheets together and hold them up against the light, new shapes appear. Some elements of some shapes may get new outlines, others may be hidden, yet others filled in. What happens depends on how well we aligned the sheets, their orientation and also the order in which we put them together.
We can put as many sheets together if we like but there are limits to what can be used. Too many, and previously newly emerged shapes disappear again or are transformed. And eventually light stops shining through.
What is important about this metaphor is that we have a very good bodily depiction of this that anybody can experience. And what we know from that experience is that the new image that comes out of the combination is instantaneous. It does not require a computation. In fact, we would find it difficult to compose a series of if-then statements that would give us that outcome.
This in fact describes how most people go about their life. They quickly pull up schemas and overlay them on top of one another to get new results. Because these overlays are never perfectly aligned, we experience new and unexpected shapes - which gives us creativity, something that is really difficult to capture under the purely computational metaphor.
But it is not exactly true that no computation is involved. When we are trying to go further, we may make some of these statements about the how we position the sheets and what would happened if we did that. That’s what it feels like when we reason. But notice, we are reasoning about the positioning of the overlays (concepts, schemas), not about their contents. Those just come up.
This is a very useful metaphor for thinking about using and combining mental schemas. But it lacks any notion of learning or return feedback. These are crucial for thinking about practice. So, this is where the clay metaphor comes in.
### **Clay impressions**
Imagine a ground covered with clay from which you want to make shapes using molds and cookie cutters. But the clay is not uniform, it reaches deeper in some places and hides rocks in others. It also contains ruts and grooves from previous cuttings. So, when we try to impress our molds or cutters into it, sometimes they go too deep and other times they can’t get in. Or can’t get in uniformly.
This means that sometimes we have to push harder or multiple times and sometimes we may even need a hammer to press the cutters in. Or sometimes, we need to reorient these molds so that they fit around the obstacles. Some of this happens without thinking and some of it requires that we pause and think about what might be hiding under the mud.
To get the shapes we want, we have to use our bodies and our minds, employ both automatic and deliberative actions, repeat the same action multiple times and then change our approach when it is not working. As the consistency of the clay changes, we react to the changes by slow adjustments in pressure. But we may also bring different tools as we want to create more elaborate shapes.
The clay metaphor is useful for thinking about how we develop the schemas we have in our inventory as we interact with our environment. It is not a matter of collecting things that just lie out there and that we can pick up and stack up somewhere. We are actively engaged in their creation. We leave an impression in the world and in return in makes an impression in us.
We have all experienced physical activities like that as children or as adults. But we think of them as separate from the work of thinking and learning. But in fact, thinking and learning is much more like this than it is like a computer. So, as we try to develop our inventory of mental representations we should not be afraid to push against the subject or our discipline, feel the touch of it and adjust our reaction. This will not be nearly as instantaneous as when we push a mold into clay, it the principle is the same.
---
> Section 8 of 21 · Avoiding Task Misalignment · id `task-alignment` · [read in the reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=task-alignment)
# Avoiding Task Misalignment for Successful Practice
## Task alignment and posture
When you perform some action, your body and/or you mind are performing a task. You are deploying all the resources to accomplish that task. Your entire being orients itself towards the accomplishment. If you can actually perform the task with any level of fluency, all of this happens automatically. When you speak, your mouth opens and makes the right shapes, when you walk, your body changes posture, when you read, your eyes focus and your brain is attuned to perceiving ink blots on a page as meaningful.
### **Running pose example**
In some ways, you only know what the task is from the posture you adopt. A good example is demonstrating running. When you are asked to adopt a static pose of a runner, you will most likely stand on one foot, lean forward, step out with the other foot and put your arm forward. Most people (as online photos show) put the same arm forward as their forward foot. This is also how the author of a poster for a pre-war Olympics drew a runner.
However, the problem with this is that it is the exact opposite of what people do when running. When you run the arm that is in front of the body, is the one that is the opposite of the forward foot. We have all run, a professional artist is skilled at depicting what they see. Yet, we so easily get it wrong. Why is that?
That is because the task of running and the task of adopting a static pose of a runner are fundamentally different. They have different goals, they require a different perspective, they employ different muscles, and so on. We therefore naturally adopt a different posture to complete these two different tasks - even though when we talk about them, we think of the pose as just a snapshot of the actual run. But our mental and physical orientation is directed towards the actual task, not our expectation of what it will be.
When what we are saying we are doing and what our mind and body are actually trying to is different is a ‘task misalignment’. And how do we know that we have a task misalignment? It may take a while but a good clue is that our posture during practice is different from the posture during performance of the activity itself.
## **Task: Key concept for understanding performance**
The idea of a task is fundamental to help us practice the right thing. Task is what you are actually doing, not what you are saying you’re doing. This is not just relevant to physical poses. Famously, we may say we are learning a subject when we are really primarily learning to pass an exam in the subject. This is important because we orient all of our efforts towards that task. So a person who is learning about something because they want to solve a problem will approach the task very differently from someone who wants to pass an exam.
This is true even in the more extensive physical activities like distance running. We may think that the aim of a professional runner is to be able to run fast but it fact it is to win races, set records or beat opponents. This means that the practice is not only focusing on speed but on speed that peaks at particular time and can be deployed in a particular contexts. So an athlete will structure their training very carefully to be ready on race day - not just to run fast at some point.
The problem is that our vision of what the task is, is compromised by our way of talking about it. We will say that we want to learn to play the piano but not say, we want to learn to play it so that we can play a three songs we like for pleasure. These are different tasks.
## **Posture: How a task is revealed**
The next key concept is that of posture. Task is what our body and mind orients itself to do. It is the posture we take to solve the task. Posture here is a metaphor - it may not be an actual physical pose. But that may be a component of it.
That’s also why experts are often bad teachers of their subject - they are performing a different task. Native speakers are not always automatically good teachers of their language or translators. Teaching and translation are different tasks and when we get ready to perform them, we adopt different postures than when we are simply trying to say something.
This has both positive and negative consequences. Negative in that we often spend a lot of time practicing to adopt the wrong posture for the actual task. Positive in that the actual task does not depend so much on the sequence as described in a textbook (writing a textbook is a different task which makes the writer adopt a different posture).
So we can run before we can walk, we can learn sign language before spoken language, we can learn more difficult math before easier math, we can learn useful medical diagnostics before learning about complex chemistry. We can learn to play jazz before the classical piano or even before any basic pop-songs. All of those things are different tasks.
## **10 Task misalignment examples**
Task misalignment is incredibly common but it can also reveal much about both the mental schemas and targets for actual practice. That’s why it is important to spend a certain amount of time closely examining examples of task misalignment at different levels.
Some common examples of when the practice of the task is misaligned with the performance.
1. Memorising vs learning / recognition vs recall
2. Reading instead of understanding
3. Practice for performance
4. Giving examples vs doing things (what is the Czech for ‘have’ as in ‘I have done’)
5. Defining things for understanding
6. Understanding for making inferences
7. Achieving good grades for developing education
8. Being able to do something vs understanding
9. Being able to do something vs teaching (expertise vs metaexpertise)
10. Playing note sequences vs playing parts of songs
### **1 Mistaking memorisation for learning**
One of the most common problems we all experience when we are learning is remembering key concepts or patterns. In response, we make a lot of effort to memorise pairs such as word and meaning or picture and label. We often make flashcards and quiz ourselves - and now, with computers and smartphones, we even turn things into games.
In as much as having things in our head is important, this is not a bad way of building up an inventory. It is great for languages, mathematical concepts, medical conditions, geography, and many more subject. But the confusion comes at thinking that being able to recall something from a prompt as in a flashcard is the same as using it in a real context.
While we are memorising items, we are developing a skill of reacting to prompts in flashcards. That is the performance we are getting better at. And gamifying this is good for motivating us but it also leads us to optimise our performance to succeed at the game rather than develop the skill we are hoping for. Because using flashcards is in itself a task and our mind/body orient itself to solve it first and foremost. So it is possible to be very good at the ‘flashcard’ game and relatively bad at the actual task that we are memorising for.
That’s not to underestimate the importance of memorising things - but we must think of it only as a supporting or scaffold task - not the ultimate target. In fact, rote learning has gained a very bad reputation precisely because of this. But when used in support of the task, it can be very useful.
### **2 Confusing recall and recognition**
There is a common mistake people make that is a subtype of the above error. It is confusing recognition for recall. Students often make this mistake during revision. They read something in a textbook or their notes and feel like they now remember it. But being able to recognise something is not the same as recognising it (as we have all found out during exams at some point). That’s why two-sided flashcards are so useful even if they themselves suffer from a different kind of this problem.
### **3 Reading instead of understanding**
Many students spend a lot of time reading assigned texts. But ‘reading’ is just the name of the task. It is not simply to decode the letters into sound and create mental pictures. The actual task is understanding, comparing, making connections and conclusions. Those all require different approaches and have to be practiced separately. And many of them happen before and after reading.
### **4 Mistaking practice for performance**
This is a very easy mistake we make. We are practicing something that looks like the thing we are practicing for. But it is missing a crucial element - the moment of live engagement. Whether it is actually performing in front of a live audience or simply in a context where the outcomes matter, the moment provides an important element which orients us differently. It could be simply an increased level of internal pressure or a new context. Which is why (as we’ll see below) we always have to work hard to link practice to performance and we also have to practice the elements of unpredictability in performance.
### **5 Substituting performance for practice**
The opposite confusion is also common. We are performing something every day and we are assuming that we’re also practicing. But practice is a very different task and requires different orientation and focus. We can improve through repetition of performance in this way but only with reflection and certain levels of performance will only be possible if we separate practice from regular performance.
### **6 Substituting giving examples for using them**
When somebody asks you to give an example of something you are familiar with, you often struggle. That is not because you lack knowledge or skill but because giving an example of something is a different task that requires a different orientation.
But there is is an even bigger problem. Because when we are giving an example, our entire schematic orientation changes, the examples tend to be incomplete. They follow the schema of example giving and that leads to big misconception.
Both giving examples and giving examples that actually represent what you are giving the example of is a task that requires a different kind of mental orientation and focus - which means something that can be practiced.
### **7 Substituting defining for understanding**
A special kind of task misalignment is confusing being able to define something for understanding it. This is a companion to the problem with giving examples. Giving definitions is a very different task and skill from understanding and figuring things out.
The opposite is also true. Reading a definition is different from learning to be able to understand the definition. Something textbook authors should take to heart.
### **8 Substituting understanding for making inferences**
There’s a difference between understanding something and being able to make useful inferences about it. They are different tasks. I may be trying to understand something in order to be able to restate its definition in my own words. For example, I may try to understand the difference between voltage and wattage in electricity and be able to explain it on an exam. But it does not follow, that I can make useful inferences about the design of an electrical system. On the other hand, I may be able to do that without a full understanding of the difference.
This is why so often curricula are misaligned with their stated goal - for example, the goal is to have a population that can deal better with their finances or make good decisions about nuanced policy issues but the curricula are designed to create a population that understands differential calculus or probability theory.
### **9 Substituting good grades for education**
Teaching or studying to the test are well-known phenomena. But understanding the task misalignment helps us better think about how they work.
Just like with gamification, the grades provide the student and her teacher a goal towards which they should both orient all their efforts. Education may be the goal, but all effort goes towards the test. It is telling that people take practice tests - not practice the skill that the test is supposed to measure. For some tests, there are entire industries that promise to prepare you for it (from books to in-person tutorials). Their advertising never mentions that you will actually be good at the thing the test measures. And indeed, you may not have to be.
### **10 Being able to do something for understanding**
This is the converse of the understanding - inferences misalignment. We assume that just being able to do something means we can explain it. But those are very different tasks. We are all native speakers of at least one language, but very few of us can name let alone describe most of the rules that govern how we speak.
### **11 Understanding for being able to explain**
Einstein supposedly said, that if you cannot explain something simply, you don’t understand it. But that is not true. Understanding and explaining are two different tasks and it is entirely possible, in fact, it is very common that we can do one and not the other.
That is not to say that the act of explaining something does not improve our understanding. It most definitely does. But the problem is that it often improves our own understanding more than that of others. That’s why introductory texts are often not very useful to learn much about the discipline because they distil somebody’s own understanding.
Meta expertise (expertise about a subject or skill) is a separate skill because describing things is a different task from trying to understand them. They share many similarities but they are different.
### **12 Being able to play a series of notes vs playing songs**
When people practice sight reading (playing directly from sheet music), they often spend a lot of time practicing which note they should play based on what they see in the notation. But that is a very different task from playing the song. The task of playing a song from sheet music is not to quickly react with a finger to each individual note - it is to translate patterns into a flow of music. Therefore both require different kinds of practice. They may both contribute to the general skill of being able to play music but they are not the same.
## **Why is task misalignment so dangerous**
Other than not practicing at all, practicing the wrong thing is the most common cause for failing to improve. And we may not always know that we are practicing the wrong thing until we try a different approach.
Not being able to exactly pin-point the task should not stop us from starting to practice, but a significant part of our reflection should be about how what we are practicing actually relates to the task.
Task misalignment can have two consequences for practice:
1. Misdirection (waste of time)
2. Redirection (building scaffolding)
### **Misdirecting task misalignment**
When we completely misalign the task such as with the example of adopting a running pose, we get very little benefit for practice until we notice that misalignment. We are simply practicing the wrong thing. It is not likely that standing on one foot with the wrong arm forward is going to improve any aspect of our running. We might get some side benefits from the strength and stability training but there are most likely more useful ways of doing that.
But there are situations when practicing the ‘wrong thing’ can be useful. That’s the case of redirection of scaffolding.
### **Redirection (scaffolding)**
As we get into higher levels of performance, it is impossible to simply gain enough input by performing the task exactly. Or we need to develop some additional skill to help us practice in the first place.
Memorising vocabulary is an example of a misaligned task that actually helps us build the scaffolding for reading comprehension or translation in the language.
A musician learning to count rhythm or to use a metronome is an example of a scaffolding that will enable that musician to actually practice rhythmic playing later on even if the thing she is practicing is not performance.
Practicing grammatical constructions of academic language will enable us to practice composing paragraphs later on even though academic writing is not simply putting together these constructions, and so on.
---
> Section 9 of 21 · Four Approaches to Practice · id `approaches` · [read in the reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=approaches)
# Four Approaches to Practice
## The importance of Practice
> “What do you do every day to improve that is similar to how a musician practices their scales?” interview question suggested by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross in their book Talent.
>
Most people do not practice things to get better at them. They just do what they are doing when it comes to it and improve a little bit each time until they hit a plateau. This works for many things in life and allows us to get good enough at most things to the level we need to get by.
But there are many types of activities that simply require more focus and effort than just doing something now and again. Playing a musical instrument, speaking a foreign language, touch typing, writing and reading are some examples of activities where focused practice is essential to even get started. But most people stop practicing even here after they get good enough and never improve beyond a certain point.
There are four approaches you can take to practice.
1. Repetitive practice
2. Reflective practice
3. Purposeful practice
4. Deliberate practice
I ordered them here by how effective they are to help you overcome the limitations of working memory to increase fluency. But the biggest jump is in going from repetitive practice to reflective practice. In fact, reflective practice is something that you can do all the time, purposeful and deliberate practice may not always be an option.
## 1 Repetitive practice
Repetitive practice is when you just try to repeat something many times in sequence to get better at it. For example, when you repeat a word many times to try to remember it or when you study for an exam. This is better than nothing but it has severe limits.
Apart from being boring, simply repeating things over and over does not let you combine things into bigger chunks. It also relies on having some aptitude or prior knowledge. Which is why people often give up when they try to learn something by rote and say “I’m just not very good at it.” But in fact, their attitude should be:
But sometimes we don’t even do that much and we just rely on getting better at something by doing it multiple times. We call that experience but we should be cautious about assuming pure experience is enough to continue improving. This can be best summarised by this quote from Stephen Covey (author of the famous book ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People’):
## 2 Reflective practice
Adding reflection to repetition is what makes your practice reflective. That is when you focus on the task you’re trying to practice and try to identify what chunks you could create to reduce the demands on working memory and what are the most effective ways of practicing to develop those chunks.
### **Advantage of reflective practice**
The advantage of reflective practice over purposeful or deliberate practice is that you can do it all the time. You can do much of it in your head and add in repetition when you have time.
Reflective practice is what people who are good at what they do engage in all the time. That is how they can keep improving and exploring new areas. They are constantly thinking about what they do, how it all fits together and how to improve what they do - even just a little bit. This means that when they come to actually perform the action, they’re focused on the improvement. And that makes it easier for them to develop chunks or mental representations.
### **Disadvantage of reflective practice**
The disadvantage is that your progress is uneven and takes much longer.
Also, this does require that you keep whatever you want to improve top of mind. If you are really interested in what you’re trying to get better at, you will always think about it. But if what you’re trying to improve at is just something you have to do, you will probably not do enough reflective repetition to truly improve.
This could be illustrated by another quote from Magnus Carlsen when asked for advice on how to get better at chess:
Most people cannot be sufficiently obsessed about most things, so they need more structured approach to improve.
## 3 Purposeful practice
Purposeful practice is when you set an exact target for improvement and schedule time slots over a period of time to get better at it.
Even if you main mode of improvement is reflective practice, you will need to insert some bouts of purposeful practice into the process. It is especially important at the beginning of learning any new discipline or if what you are learning requires fluency (such as writing).
To develop a block of purposeful practice to improve at something, you can proceed in 5 steps:
1. Identify what aspect of your performance you want to improve (think about moments when your fluency gets disrupted)
2. Break the performance into chunks that you can practice (these are not ‘real’ chunks, just ones that you can work on)
3. Decide on how you are going to measure improvement and/or get feedback on what you do
4. Practice in blocks of effort anywhere between 10 and 90 minutes depending on the type of task (30 minute blocks are a good default) for a total of between 6 and 20 hours depending on the level you are starting from
5. Review changes in improvement and reflect on how to fine-tune the practice work and the chunks you are trying to develop
The review is the last step on the list but you need to reflect on how things went after every practice session.
Purposeful practice is necessary to achieve a minimum level at some skills but it is also great for areas where you want to improve a little bit but that you don’t want to think about all the time.
On the other hand, if the process of purposeful practice sounds like too much work, you can always incorporate elements of purposeful practice into your general reflective practice. But you have to get into the habit of having frequent mental check-ins with yourself and taking the time to stop the flow you’re in and repeat a certain action in a focused way.
## 4 Deliberate practice
Deliberate practice is when you follow an established programme that is designed to increase your performance. Ideally, you do this with a coach but you always need to have a very good system of receiving feedback on your performance to help you focus your practice.
Deliberate practice in the strictest sense is not available to everyone and for any skill. These are the prerequisites:
1. Working in a discipline where it is easy to measure progress mostly along a single dimension.
2. Following a well-established programme of development that has had years of input based on the experiences of different people.
3. Working with an experienced coach who is at least at your level or one level above (unless there are good mechanisms of self-feedback)
A good examples of disciplines where deliberate practice (under different names) has been particularly successful are:
- Certain sports (particularly individual ones)
- Musical performance
- Chess
- Typing
- Memory
But elements of deliberate practice can be inserted into many other fields:
- Language learning
- Reading and writing
- Photography
- Programming
- Using computers
- Academic knowledge
The key is to find points where your performance starts to suffer because of the limitations of working memory.
Even though the Academic Writing Bootup calls itself deliberate practice, it is at heart a prescription for purposeful practice but with as much of deliberate practice inserted in as possible.
---
> Section 10 of 21 · Practice in Different Disciplines · id `disciplines` · [read in the reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=disciplines)
# How do people practice in different disciplines
## Musical instruments
There are many lessons writers can learn from musical performance. Here are a few lessons I found particularly relevant (some of those we mentioned before):
1. Focus on the problem parts. Do not just wait for the part you have trouble with to come up, practice it in isolation. Otherwise you will never get enough opportunities to practice the things you struggle with the most.
2. Always know what you are going to practice when you sit down or pick up your instrument. Don’t just start randomly noodling. You will not get enough focused practice and will be too distracted to make the most of your time.
3. When practicing a new piece, identify the bigger repeating chunks (sometimes hundreds of notes) and think of them as one. You can watch classical pianists on YouTube describe how they do it for complex pieces and jazz musicians talking about how they use this to ‘memorise’ hundreds of jazz standards. [REF]
4. But you also need to do the opposite. When something is particularly difficult, break it down into much smaller parts to practice. These are not necessarily the most meaningful components that go together. Sometimes you practice just a two- or three- note transition between meaningful chunks.
5. Vary speed and rhythm while practicing. Slow down far below the speed you are planning to play at. Break up the rhythm first before you put it back together.
6. Transcribe what you hear while focusing on the parts. Again, you will see lots of videos on YouTube sharing transcriptions of interesting pieces of music along with analysis. Particularly, for jazz musicians transcribing solos is an essential part of the process. [REF]
7. Always practice in the context of performance. Public performance is different from practice because new possible inputs into working memory are introduced. So while you should focus on what you are practicing most of the time, sometimes you can deliberately introduce a few distractions to learn to cope with that.
8. Put limits on yourself. Only play with a few notes or just some keys, or skip certain notes.
9. Record yourself and listen back. You will be surprised how different the recording is from what you were hearing in your head while playing.
10. You can develop creativity and means of self-expression by repeating patterns and also by initially just repeating what others do.
## Running
Running seems like it should have very few things to offer writers but in fact this whole programme was inspired by the famous Couch to 5K. Here are some of the lessons:
1. It is possible to develop stamina over relatively short period of time and to develop skills that were hard to imagine at the start. You just need to break the process down into small chunks and slowly increase them over time.
2. While this general process will work for almost anyone, there is no one precise series of steps that will accomplish that goal. There are many variations on the C25K programme and also on similar approaches that take you to longer distances and they all achieve similar results.
3. Accumulating knowledge from across many people practicing works. People have always run but the development of new training approaches have expanded running into an activity that is more accessible to more people and that has enabled more athletes at the top to continue improving beyond what was once thought possible.
Another interesting lesson from running and similar sports is that simply being alongside others increases performance - particularly if they are slightly above your own level. It is not exactly clear why or how this works but simply seeing others being able to do something seems to increase level of performance even without consciously trying to compete with them. Knowing that something is possible, makes it seem like a more achievable task.
## Chess
The biggest lesson from chess is that complex and rich chunks are absolutely essential to overcoming the limitations of working memory. Human chess players simply cannot calculate as far into the future to beat even a very simple computer. But chess masters were able to beat computers for decades by being able to draw on large patterns. Even the famous first match where Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, he was able to win one game and tie two. [REF]
Nowadays computers beat humans easily but it is at least in part because they started using techniques that help them recognise larger patterns in the same way human players do.
Chess is the one area where the notion of ‘deliberate practice’ is reliably known and recognised. Not all players use it in the same way but all players practice in a highly reflective way. Here are some of the things chess players do:
1. Study past games analytically and replay them on the chessboard or in their mind.
2. Analyse all of their own chess matches with input from others and focus on what they could do differently next time.
3. Focus on developing a mental inventory of large patterns such as opening moves, end games, etc.
4. Learn from others. Chess players don’t just play against other players. They talk with each other about the games they just played or plays other people played. Often even opponents will analyse the game with each other afterward.
5. Learn with others. Top chess champions have teams and coaches but most serious chess players are members of clubs and practice for championships.
The key lesson of chess is that you can improve with focused reflective repetition drawing on the experience of others even in a very abstract area. This is deliberate practice at its best.
The other lesson is something chess shares with music. It is that you can you can develop creativity and personal style by reflective repetition of patterns set by others. Deliberate reflective practice does not lead simply to learning to repeat, it builds an inventory of patterns that is unique to each person and that they can use in creative ways to express themselves or solve new problems they encounter.
> “You practice something and you get creative.’ Gary Kasparov [ref]
>
The final lesson of chess is that the simple rules of how things are put together are not enough. You need to develop an ability to think in larger patterns, if you want to have any chance of productive fluency.
> One way to succeed is to have a bit of aptitude and become obsessed. Another way is to develop some interest and follow a deliberate practice plan. (Magnus Carlsen) [REF]
>
## Memory
There are memory competitions and those competitions have champions. People will compete in disciplines such as the number of digits memorised in 5 minutes (the world record is 519 [ref]) or the sequence of playing cards.
Testing the capacity of working memory was first done with analysing how many digits people can memorise. And according to Ericsson [ref], he formulated some of the first ideas about deliberate practice when he was running experiments with number memory. This is what crystalized the idea of chunks but also the importance of learning from others.
Here are some key things we can learn from memory champions:
1. Chunking doesn’t “just” work by accident. It is the only way it can work. Recognising larger patterns and keeping them in immediate memory for later use is essential.
2. Adding meaning to chunks is essential but the meaning does not have to be intrinsic to the chunk. This is the idea behind memory palaces. You associate an item you want to quickly recall with a vivid picture in your mind that you had ‘prepared’ earlier. The title of the book “Moonwalking with Einstein” by Joshua Foer is about one such image he used to win a memory competition.
3. Visualisation is an important tool. Not everybody has the same ability to visualise vivid images in their mind but it is essential to walk through performance in your head in any way possible.
4. Anything can intrude into working memory. Memory champions often go to extremes to screen out distractions such as wearing blindfolds with pinpricks for seeing only the thing you are looking at and headsets that block out noise. Anything that can take up a valuable slot in working memory needs to be screened out. The lesson is not that we should be wearing blindfolds while practicing but that we should be paying attention to other inputs competing for a place in our working memory. At one extreme is to wear protective gear but another option is to incorporate the environmental distractions into the mental representations as part of practice.
5. Attention is important and as we saw in the example of trying to remember the long number, simply increase the level of focus makes this easier. There are limits what can be achieved with attention but it alone can reduce the load on working memory.
6. Not all skills learned through deliberate practice are easily transferable. Just because somebody can win a memory contest, that does not mean that they will never forget their keys or somebody’s name. Their practice was all aimed at memorising digits or cards or something similar. But if they wanted to be able to do the keys, they would have to practice that.
## Foreign language learning by polyglots
There are many disciplines where deliberate practice has a huge potential but it is not used. Learning foreign languages is one of these. Language teaching and learning is full of practice activities. In fact, you cannot have a textbook without practice activities and often additional practice books are published.
But as a long-time language teacher (and even teacher trainer and textbook author) as well as a language learner, I can confirm that language teaching and learning falls short of the ideal of purposeful practice in multiple ways. It is both in methods and assumptions. In short, traditional language teaching largely focuses on two things:
1. long-term rather than working memory
2. practice with respect to the requirements of the textbook, rather than the task
I tried to outline a how some of the lessons of deliberate practice could be inserted into language learning in Building your language muscle [REF].
However, there is one area in language learning where we can learn some serious lessons and that is the people who have learned multiple languages called polyglots. Learning another language feels almost like a magical task that requires special aptitude to most people. This may make it seem like there’s nothing to learn from polyglots who surely must have preternaturally developed abilities. But that is not the case. What sets polyglots apart from casual language learners is:
1. Enough interest in the task that it motivates them to spend time and effort
2. Techniques that draw on the ideas of deliberate practice (even if this is not done explicitly)
Both are important lessons for improving academic writing. Academic writing, is after all like a foreign language to many native speakers and a literal foreign language to many more writers. It also requires some investment in time and effort but the good news is that it much less than acquiring and maintaining fluency in 3 or more languages.
There are many accounts of how polyglots learn languages but we can draw on two. First, about what polyglots have in common. A [video on what polyglots do differently](https://youtu.be/ROh_-RG3OVg) by the Slovak polyglot Lýdia Machová lists 10 features of practice common to the people who can master multiple languages. Here we will focus on these:
1. Polyglots do not all have the same method. What they have in common is dedication of time and effort.
2. Polyglots do not learn the majority of their skill in the classroom. In fact, most of them learn in on their own, drawing in others as necessary for resources.
3. Polyglots mostly do not use textbooks. They draw on their own materials to fit their needs. They spend a lot of time preparing practice materials.
4. Polyglots have developed techniques that allow them to get as much practice as possible with useful feedback for further learning. They achieve this by:
1. using the languages in practice as much as possible (both speaking and listening)
2. not being afraid of mistakes but accepting them as part of the learning process
3. doing as much as possible with what they have (simplifying where possible)
5. Polyglots develop positive attitudes to the acts of practice.
6. Polyglots practice in small chunks. They find it more effective to study 60 minutes a day than 5 hours in one day.
Polyglots also set their own targets based on performance and carefully monitor progress.
The other lesson we can draw from Fluent in Three Months by Benny Lewis [REF]:
> In the initial stages, try to build a large inventory of usable chunks focused on performance. But as you want to progress to more advanced levels of performance, you need to start drawing on knowledge of principles of how language is put together. [REF] - paraphrase
>
The language teaching community has also spent a lot of time thinking about competence and how to assess it. This has resulted in two similar frameworks for judging how “good” someone is based on what they are able to achieve in the real world. We will use these as an inspiration for defining competence in academic writing.
---
> Section 11 of 21 · Timing of Practice · id `timing` · [read in the reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=timing)
# Timing of practice: How long and how often does it take
## Timing is crucial
Starting from very limited skill level is a very emotionally taxing experience. The task ahead of us seems insurmountable and every step we take seems to take us no closer to our goal. This leads many people to give up before they even get started. But if we know how long to expect, we can be sure even the smallest step is a real progress in the right direction. These steps accumulate and when we look back it seems impossible we were ever able to travel the distance.
There are two broad questions we want to know:
1. How long will it be until our performance improves so that we can be fluent enough to do meaningful work?
2. How often and how long should my practice sessions be?
Each of these larger questions contain additional puzzles such as:
1. Can we break the larger goal into subgoals?
2. What happens when we take a break from practice?
3. Does it matter what time of day we practice?
4. and so on….
The bad news is that we don’t know the precise answer to any of these questions. But the good news is that we have a very good idea about the rough parameters based on the shared experiences of many different types of people over many disciplines. And it seems that as long as you stick within them, you can be confident of success.
The other good news is that there is a lot of scope for you to modify a programme that fits your situation as long as you stick to the basic principles..
## Total amount of time: 10,000 vs 20 hours
How long does it take to develop fluent expertise? The scary number that was made popular by Malcolm Gladwell is 10,000 hours over about 10 years [REF]. That is a more or less correct number for people at the top of their field.
But can you develop enough fluency to be able to perform adequately at a skill where you start with nothing in less time? Or can you overcome a plateau of performance in less time?
The answer to those questions is yes. And the number made popular by Josh Kaufman [REF] is 20 hours. That is about the amount of time of real practice in which you can:
1. Learn to run 5 kilometers from nothing
2. Learn to play a few songs on a musical instrument
3. Learn to touch type
4. Learn to speak enough of a foreign language to talk about yourself or order food in a restaurant
5. Learn to read confidently in another alphabet (Russian or Greek)
Now, this is not 20 hours in classes, or 20 hours of reading. It is 20 hours of concerted practice. But it means that is you practice for 30 minutes 5 times a week, you can achieve meaningful progress in 4 - 8 weeks.
Which is why many programmes we mentioned are spread over about 8 weeks. You can probably compress this into as little as 4 weeks and expand it to 12 weeks but this is a good benchmark.
Also, there’s nothing precise about 20 hours. Couch to 5K probably adds up to about 16 hours of running, an introductory language learning session may be closer to 30 hours.
If you are not starting from absolute scratch and you just want make progress with a component of a larger skill, you could probably even make meaningful progress over 3-6 hours over about 2 weeks. This is how long it may take a musician to truly master a new song, for example.
So, here are some **recommendations** for how to allocate time to developing or improving performance improvement:
1. For your larger goals, allocate anywhere between 15 and 30 hours over 8 to 12 weeks; this will be about 1.5 and 4 hours a week over 3 to 5 days.
2. You could probably compress this into a 4 week period by practicing about an hour a day. Some skills are more amenable to this than others but there are limits. Practicing 30 hours for a week will not let you develop your skills as 30 hours over 2-3 months.
3. Do not try to set goals for much further into the future than 12 weeks. In fact, you may benefit from splitting your 8-12 week programmes into shorter sprints to give you enough of a chance to evaluate your progress.
4. For your smaller learning goals, allocate into anywhere between 3 and 6 hours over 2-3 weeks; this will be about 1.5 to 3 hours a week
5. You should probably schedule some rest days and give yourself time to consolidate.
6. Some of the time should be spent reflecting and recalibrating goals. Whether that time counts as practice will depend on the type of activity. Thinking about running goals and form will help you improve very little, thinking about music, chess or writing in a targeted way may actually contribute to improved performance. But it should probably not be much more than about 10% of your overall time spent on the activities.
**Note**: The times above are based on what is a sensible time commitment for most people who are serious about improvement. They are consistent with what people report but we do not have systematic evidence that would let us be more specific.
The times will vary based on your current level of skill. Complete novices may see quick improvement over shorter periods of practice time but will not be able to benefit from cramming more time into a shorter span.
People closer to the peak performance may only see very little improvement after a lot of effort. But they will often be able to achieve that improvement by adding more practice time to every day.
For example, a beginner musician may be able to play a few songs at a satisfactory level after 20 hours of practice spread over a month in a way that they would not be able to if they crammed 30 hours into the first week. But a professional musician may require 20 hours just to perfect one section of a larger song to a public performance standard. But they may be able to achieve that improvement by practicing 3 hours a day for a week.
## Practice session length
The next question we should answer is how long should individual practice sessions be. The recommended number varies but 30 minutes is a good starting point. It is sufficiently short for most people to be able to focus and sufficiently long that a meaningful amount of work can be done.
However, even practice sessions as short as 10 minutes can make a significant contribution to improvement. Particularly if the skill being practiced is more of a building block. Memorising vocabulary or practicing forms or scales are all things that can be done in 10-minute increments over the course of a day.
But even some aspects of writing can be done in 10 minute increments. In fact, being able to do something in just 10 minutes, may in itself be a skill to develop [REF - Ninja writing].
In the initial stages, you will definitely benefit more from two 30 minute practice sessions over two days than one 60 minute session and then skipping a day. People often talk about the consolidation that happens during sleep. That is plausible but we do not know for certain.
However, there are other types of activities that require sustained focus for longer than 30 minutes or at least several 30-minute blocks with short breaks between. This is important particularly for activities where so called ‘flow’ is a desired state. This will be particularly important for writing where scheduling 90 min writing sessions will be an important part of the process.
But remember, we need to distinguish between doing ‘work’ for 90 minutes and practicing with purpose for 90 minutes. Simply repeating a task does not lead to an improvement after a while. In fact, it seems that after people reach a plateau, they regress slightly if they just continue to repeat what they learned.
Plateau is a negative word but we can also think about it as reaching the level you need to perform at high enough quality and with sufficient fluency to reach your goal. This is fine. But often external circumstances change something about the environment or your aims and desires change and the current level won’t be enough.
This is where many people feel like they reached the end of their potential but with focused reflective practice, they can almost always break through the plateau and improve (even if only a little bit).
If you find yourself in this situation, you will often benefit from working in shorter sessions but with more focus on improving performance.
## Practice times and routines
What is the best time of day to practice? As with all of these questions, there is a relatively simple answer but with much variation.
The simple answer is, practice whenever you can get the most out of the allocated time. That’s when you can focus the most. For many people that is early in the morning but for some late at night.
Right after lunch or an intensive meeting, your energy is probably depleted so that you won’t get the most out of your practice session. Particularly for writing, it is best to do your practice session before you did your reading - or in other words, read the day before, make notes, but when you start practicing your writing, start before you had a chance to set your thoughts in many different directions.
Of course, one of the things you are practicing could be overcoming tiredness and distraction. Athletes talk about learning to ‘run on tired legs’. You can use the same attitude for developing skills to work during times of day that is not the best for you. Develop switching muscles.
You should have a reliable practice routine at the time that suits you best but you should not be so dependent on that routine that even the smallest disruption to it will stop you from practicing. Because when it comes down to it any practice time is better than none.
---
> Section 12 of 21 · Identifying Need for Practice · id `reflection-identifying-need` · [read in the reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=reflection-identifying-need)
# Reflection as a method for identifying need for practice
## Why is reflection important
The key component to success in practice is reflection. We know that from a lot of research on metacognition.
As an example, we can explore a common myth that young children are good at learning languages. Young children (under the age of about 10) are good at acquiring a language in the same way we all have done it. They can even do it for multiple languages at a time. But children are horrible at learning a foreign language in school if by learning we mean going to class for two hours a week and maybe doing some homework in between. That is because their ability to develop concepts and rely on them to guide their practice is not yet as sophisticated.
A committed adult can learn as much in a week of intense study as a child in a year of attending classes in this way. That is because they have experience they can draw on and ability to regulate their learning. Teaching a child a few grammar rules will just confuse them. Teaching an adult a few grammar rules will accelerate their learning. Of course, the rules should be simple and only there to guide practice but they make a lot of difference.
But an even more important reason for reflection about where we are is that without it, we end up practicing the wrong thing. Here we can learn some lessons from musicians. When learning or practicing a song, don’t always start playing it from the beginning. Practice the bits you find difficult. Otherwise you end up being really good at the start of the song and never will figure out the difficult bits later on.
## What to reflect on or signals that you need to practice
### **Speed**
The first signal that something is wrong with your performance is that you slow down. There is no absolute perfect speed for writing or anything (unless you are literally racing) but there is a minimal speed for you to be able to do it at all.
Being able to write 700 words in 30 minutes does not make you a better writer. But not being able to write at least 200 when you do know what you want to write will make you a struggling writer. You will spend so much time fiddling about with each individual word or sentence that you will constantly keep running into limits of working memory and find it difficult to think about what you’re writing.
### **Fluency**
Fluency is different from speed. You can write very fast but if you do it in stops and starts, you will suffer from the same effects on working memory. That does not mean that you cannot pause in the middle of a sentence to think about what you’re going to say next but you should not find yourself stopping in the middle of a phrase or a word (too often).
The same goes for other kinds of performance. When you try to run fast, at some point your form will start to suffer and you will have to go back to focus on it. The same goes for playing a musical instrument. You can speed up a lot but your expression will suffer.
So, the lesson is that sometimes you have to slow down to increase your fluency. And only after your fluency is up, you can start speeding up again.
### **Accuracy**
When speaking, reading or writing, the name of the game is ‘fluency and accuracy’. That is the heart of the definition of dyslexia “condition that interferes with fluent and accurate reading and writing”. But dyslexia is not the only thing that does this. Speaking or writing in a foreign language (including academic language) does the same thing.
So the other signal that you should start reflecting on your performance is when you start making more errors than usual.
However, at the most basic level, fluency is more important than accuracy. Particularly for writing. You can always go and fix your errors. And what’s even more important is that focus on accuracy can interfere with fluency. If you are constantly thinking about being accurate, your working memory will be swamped and you won’t be able to keep up the fluency needed.
That’s why copy editors can read through a whole book and not know much about what it was about, because all they were focusing on was grammar and spelling.
### **Emotion**
Another signal that you should start reflecting on how you could practice to improve your performance is stress. And feelings of stress are a good signal that your working memory is being swamped and you can’t do the thing you’re trying to do.
People who move to a new country and have to speak a different language the whole day are often exhausted by the end of the day. Their working memory is constantly under siege and as a result everything takes more time and more effort.
The emotion that accompanies dyslexia is often the biggest issue. When you finish a bit of reading or writing and feel so exhausted and dispirited that you want to cry, you develop a feeling of hate towards the activity. And dyslexic children who develop greater fluency that this isn’t the case for them any more completely change their feelings, as well.
So feeling bad during doing something should not be a signal to you that the activity is not right for you or that it is just inherently awful. When you feel bad while doing something, it should be a signal that you should focus on the thing that weighs you down and practice it until the weight is lifted.
The mantra should not be: “Practice makes perfect” but “Practice makes happy.”
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> Section 13 of 21 · Techniques for Deciding What to Practice · id `deciding-what-to-practice` · [read in the reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=deciding-what-to-practice)
# Techniques for deciding what to practice
### Six methods for deciding what to practice
Deciding on which mental representations will actually be useful to help us with performance is the most difficult part. Which is why it is best if we can follow an established programme (such as the Couch to 5K for running). But this is not always possible. In those cases, we have to find our own path. This takes more time but it has some benefit because it helps us reflect on the process and journey.
Here is what you need:
1. Establish a feedback loop
2. Reflect on break points
3. Establish measurement
4. Retrace your steps
5. Build scaffolding
6. Learn from others
### 1 Establish a feedback loop
This is the most important component of any practice. You need feedback to help you judge your performance but most importantly changes to performance. This is easy for things like running where all you need is the objective measurements of distance and time. These can be supplemented by measures of exertion such as heart rate. But even here, subjective or semi subjective measures come into play. Perception of effort or running form form an important part of the development of a runner.
But effective feedback loops exist even in much more subjective disciplines such as musical performance. They do have an objective component (number of errors, keeping to rhythm, etc.) but even subjective components such as expressiveness can be evaluated.
Every discipline has some objective and some subjective sources of feedback, as well as some in between. For example, in here are some in academic writing:
- Objective
- Spelling or grammar errors
- Choice of vocabulary
- Number of words written
- Length of sentences
- Correctness of citations
- Semi-subjective
- Accuracy of paraphrasing a position
- Correctness of assertions
- Cohesion or coherence
- Conformance to genre conventions
- Readability
- Subjective
- Persuasiveness of argument
- Stylistic beauty
- Feelings about the writing process
- Feelings about how accurately you expressed what you wanted to say
There may be other measures that are relevant to you. You can find them by:
- Analysing feedback from others (explicit or implicit)
- Comparing your output to that of others (quality or quantity)
- Reflecting on your emotions
### 2 Reflect on breakpoints
Once you have an effective feedback loop, you can get information about where you need to improve. You have to do two things:
1. Reflect on what the source of the issue is.
2. Reflect on how you could break down the activity into smaller chunks to practice and develop more effective mental representations.
For example, you feel that you don’t write enough during your writing sessions. You’ve measured it and you only write 100 words in 30 minutes even when you do know what you want to write and would like to increase it to 200 words.
1. Think about when you stopped or slowed down. Was it because
1. You did not know how to start
2. You did not know how to express what you want to say
3. You stopped and rephrased every part of a sentence or you agonised over every word
4. You had to look up too many words in the dictionary
2. Which ever of these issues is slowing you down, you can then think about breaking it down into smaller components to practice
1. If starting a sentence or writing is a problem, only focus on that. Think further about at which point you feel most pressure and think about how you could focus on just the point.
2. What parts of expressing yourself were the problem? Words, academic phrasing, paragraph composition? Any one of these could be practiced.
3. If you stop frequently, analyse why. Which aspects could you practice to get better at?
4. What kinds of words do you most often look up? What is the problem?
### 3 Establish measurement
Measuring your performance and changes over time is essential to successful practice. It gives you focus about what to practice, suggests new directions, and also helps with monitoring about whether you are practicing the wrong thing. But seeing your progress can also motivate you to do more.
In short, we can say that measurement plays two different roles in practice:
1. Direction
2. Motivation
How and what you measure is a more difficult question. We already gave examples of what to measure in the section on establishing a feedback loop. Now let’s have a look at how to do it. Essentially, there are two categories:
1. External measures such as speed, quantity, error rate
2. Perception of effort such as feelings of tiredness, how hard an activity is, or how we feel about the quality of our performance or even the activity itself
To improve, you should always keep an eye on where you are at the moment and reflect on whether you are getting better or worse. But for specific improvements you need to keep records.
For example, in writing it is easy to keep track of both subjective and objective measures of your writing:
1. Keep a log of writing times and words written
2. Keep a diary of your feelings about writing
3. Count the number of spelling or grammar errors your spelling checker found
You can then compare changes over time and think about what you did to make that change.
But how do you measure the quality of your writing? How do you know whether you are writing in the way that will fit in with people in your discipline? Here you can use several comparative techniques.
1. Reading for writing
2. Flash paraphrasing
When you **read for writing**, return to some important papers in your discipline you had read and focus on the various phrases and expressions that make it seem special. Make a list of them and see how many of them can you use in your own writing. You can also go to a writing guide such as the ‘Academic Phrasebank’ and see how many of the phrases the authors you are reading are using.
Do not just go from the phrasebank to your own writing. Find the examples in your discipline first. Then try to internalise them (you can even make flashcards with sentences in which they were used) and then measure how many you naturally start using.
You will eventually find that this comes to you quite naturally. That is how people who ‘are good at writing’ learned it (they just did it informally).
Another more targeted approach is what we might call **flash paraphrasing**. This was inspired by this quote:
> “[Benjamin Franklin] first set out to see how closely he could reproduce the sentences in an article once he had forgotten their exact wording. So he chose several of the articles whose writing he admired and wrote down short descriptions of the content of each sentence—just enough to remind him what the sentence was about. After several days he tried to reproduce the articles from the hints he had written down.” (from Peak by Anders Ericsson)
>
A similar recommendation was made by Stanley Fish in his book on ‘How to write a sentence’. The ideas is that you start by replicating sentences and focusing on the parts that make them tick.
### 4 Retracing your steps
When you are finding your own path to improvement or even when you work with a coach, you sometimes find yourself going down blind alleys and have to retrace your steps. For example, it turns out that what you are practicing is not a meaningful part of the performance, or you are working with chunks that are too small or too large.
This is a part of the process and you should embrace it. It will not feel great at the time but you should always appreciate the learning opportunity.
With exercise, they say, if it does not hurt, you’re not doing it right. With learning it is the same. But you should always be on the look out for the right kind of pain and wrong kind of pain. The right kind of pain is tiredness and soreness. This leads to growth and you can even appreciate the pain as leading to the satisfaction of your goals. The wrong kind of pain is one that leads to injury. It is not always easy to tell which kind of pain you are experiencing.
Which is where reflection plays such a vital role. Take note of your discomfort and how you felt later. You can then use that lesson to remind yourself next time you experience that the pain passed, that you’d been there before and it led to a good result.
### 5 Building scaffolding
Not all things you practice are a part of the target performance. But they are still necessary to develop the skill.
For example, when you speak a language, you don’t really use individual words very often. You speak in sentences. But as part of the learning process, it is very helpful to memorise lots of vocabulary using flashcards. You can then use that in developing your ability to speak in conversation even though, flashcards would not help you have a proper dialogue. Children do not use flashcards to learn their first language but very few adults can learn a new language well without some component of rote memorisation.
But not all of this scaffolding is easy. It may in itself be a skill that you can get better at with practice. There are useful and less useful ways of using flashcards to memorise vocabulary. There are good and bad strategies for converting that memorisation into an ability to have a fluent conversation.
So, you may have to spend some time working on the process of memorisation. Read some guides, dry different digital tools, make or find flashcards, etc. This may seem like it’s not a real part of the process, something that doesn’t count. But it takes time and effort and without it the rest of your practice would not be as effective.
There are many types of scaffolding involved in academic writing. It could be simply typing, keyboard shortcuts that make writing in your word processor faster, learning how to use a reference manager. But it could even be things like spelling, learning academic vocabulary, getting better at grammar, etc. And it definitely involves behaviours and habits that enable your to write.
Every single item on the above list is a skill that you can improve with practice. It may not have to be your main focus for very long but do not neglect it. Without it, the rest of the practice will be less effective.
### 6 Learn from others
Deliberate practice at its most effective is when you can build on the experiences of others who came before you. That’s why most elite performers work with coaches and spend time reflecting on the process.
You should build learning from others into your reflection. Read books or articles about writing. Watch YouTube videos of people talking about their writing. Have conversations with others about it.
But most importantly, you need to feed those lessons into what and how you practice. Try them out and see how they work for you.
Do not discount ideas from any corner but also do not think that there is only one way that can work for everyone. In fact, nothing works for everyone.
But do not judge whether something works for you until you’ve tried and measured the outcomes. And also do not think that what does not work for you now, will never work for you. Keep a list of things that sound intriguing to you and try them.
Finally, learn about practice techniques from other disciplines. Not everything will be directly applicable but many of the strategies, approaches to planning, and attitudes, will be useful. In the next section we will have a look at some lessons we can learn from other disciplines.
---
> Section 14 of 21 · Methods for Improving Repetition · id `improving-repetition` · [read in the reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=improving-repetition)
# What good practice looks like: 7 Methods for Improving Repetition
Now, lets have a look at the sort of activities you can use to practice almost anything.
Remember, our target is to overcome the limits of our working memory. There three ways to do that:
1. **Focus:** decrease distractions
2. **Offload:** use some external medium like a piece of paper
3. **Practice:** increase the size of the chunks
Only practice leads to sustained improvement. It does that by developing embodied mental schemas that can be inserted into it as chunks. We have talked about how to identify those mental schemas (or representations) to target, lets now talk about how to develop them.
As always, we are relying on the experience of others rather than a deep scientific insight into what our brains look like on the inside. But, for the most part, we don’t see any great contradictions between the two.
## Characteristics of a “true” practice session
How do you know that you have had a true deliberate practice session? For a session to count as practice, it should:
1. **Have a practice target:** Before you start your session, know what you are going to practice. It is so easy to waste your time by thinking about what to do.
2. **Focus the practice session on one thing**: Do not try to practice too many things at once. Ideally, you are just focusing on one aspect of your performance. Sometimes, you may combine more than one but then treat them as one.
3. **Focus on problems only:** Repeating on what you already know well is not helping. You should try to push yourself and that requires that you repeat the areas where you struggle.
4. **Log what you’re doing:** Make a record of what you did. Combine qualitative and quantitative aspects - how much you wrote, how you felt about the process or how you feel about the outcome. This will become very important later on but even during the time, it will help you solidify the outcomes of the session. Do NOT think of the practice session as finished until you have made a note about it (it is better to shorten the practice time and take some notes and reflect than not to reflect at all).
5. **Plan for next time:** This takes us back to point 1. If you make a plan for what you should be doing during the next practice session, it will make it easier to come to the next one prepared for success. This can very much be a part of your reflection and logging process but it is better to make it explicit because not having clear tasks at the start of practice is probably the most common cause for people not making the most of their time or even skipping the practice / work session altogether.
This brings up an important question! What if my practice session is not a ‘true’ deliberate practice session? Remember, any practice is better than no practice.
Maybe you haven’t remembered to set a practice target last time - or you find that it was the wrong target. Still, you will at least get some practice.
Or maybe you haven’t logged what you did. But hopefully, you made a mental note of what you did and that gave you some space for reflection.
### Does work count as practice?
Next question is: Can you combine work and practice? Does doing the actual tasks you are practicing count as practice? The answer is, possibly but only if you are getting enough feedback.
As we saw, people often regress slightly after they have reached a plateau. That is because normal repetition of the task does not give enough feedback for improvement. Also, in normal practice some of the tasks that you are most likely to need practice to improve do not come up often enough to give you actual repetition.
Andy Matuschak [REF] describes his experience of getting worse at sight reading sheet music because he did it less as part of his learning of more advanced pieces. At the same time, his lack of skill at sight reading made it more difficult for him to progress further.
Research shows [REF] that doctors get much better at diagnosing their patients with experience up to a certain point and then they regress slightly because they stop paying attention to improving and many of the issues they may need to diagnose simply do not come up often enough for them to keep up their skills.
So, simply doing something regularly (even if it feels like every day) will not help you improve. But you can certainly insert some elements of true practice into your work. Most important of these is reflection and focused repetition. If you reflect on what you are doing, you will notice choke points. You can then introduce little bouts of focused repetition to help you improve.
Reflection without action is not enough and neither is action without reflection. But the reflection must not be confused with meditation. The reflection has to be deliberative. It has to focus on performance and building the sort of embodied mental schemas that can be used to overcome limitations of working memory.
What this means in practice is that if you want to improve while doing the actual work, you have to inject elements of deliberate practice. This will mean that you will sometimes have to pause and repeat something you did (maybe several times and in different ways) and assess how it contributes to your performance.
Which brings us to the question of what actual practice will look like.
### What does practice look like? What kinds of activities should you perform?
So far, we’ve been talking about why practice, what to practice towards, and how to structure programme of practice. This is not an accident. In many ways knowing the goal of practice, how to apply it, and so on, is more important. The actual practice activities will offer themselves naturally and will differ based on what you came to practice. But using some clear examples and lessons from others, will help you save time and avoid too many dead ends. (While remembering that some dead ends are inevitable and are a part of the learning process).
## 7 Methods for Improving Practice
At heart, practice is nothing more than pure repetition of patterns of performance in a feedback rich environment. We already discussed the importance of feedback and broad patterns of performance. But here are some typical and effective approaches to making the repetition more effective.
1. Varying the size of chunks
2. Substitution
3. Back chaining
4. Varying speed
5. Adding rhythm
6. Adding constraints
7. Adding visualisation
### **Varying the size of chunks**
Chunking is the ultimate target but also a very powerful method. When repeating, vary the size of chunks you work with. When you repeat, try with the smallest possible chunks first, then increase them in size. And then reduce them again but using different boundaries. This technique is very common in language learning but also in music, and runners use it, as well.
Here is an example of how you could use the technique to practice the Czech example above:
> You want to internalise the pattern for *Staré knihy jsou támhle* (old books are over there) so that you can perform some actions with it*.* Start with *staré knihy* (old books) and then *jsou támhle* (are over there) but also add *knihy jsou* (books are) into the mix. And then combine these chunks in different ways *staré knihy jsou* (old books are) and *knihy jsou támhle* (books are over there).
>
### **Backchaining**
Backchaining is the same as varying the size of chunks but starting from the end. You can do it for individual components of larger patterns. In language, it works at the level of words, sentences or even paragraphs. But in other disciplines it may only work for certain components or actions.
> So in the example above, you would start repeating ‘*hle’* then add ‘*tám*’ to it to make up ‘*támhle*’. Or should start with *jsou* and then add *knihy* to the front of it to make up *knihy jsou*. The principle is obvious but people often do not realise how many variations there are.
>
### **Varying speed**
In real life, performance happens in many speeds. Speed is usually not the primary target of practice (unless you are practicing for a race or typing championship) but fluency is. Being in control over speed is very important. In some ways, that is the definition of fluency.
So, it is not the speed that is important but the variation. Speed up and slow down. Repeat in different bursts of speed. Have sessions that focus on repeating things very slowly, sessions where you focus on speed, and sessions where you vary.
Of the different speed variations, slowing down is probably the most effective. This is probably because most people find it unnatural. What you should is repeat something so while slowing down to the point of feeling strange and then try to stay at that speed. Use this slow speed to really focus on your performance.
When speeding up, don’t just rush to get it over with. Speed up with a purpose. Even if just for a short burst to get used to the idea of greater speed. Set a timer or even a metronome (see below) and slowly increase it with each repetition.
To continue with our example above:
> Have flashcards of a number of words and flip them around for increasingly short periods of time to see how well you can recognise the words.
Next start speaking the words and phrases as slowly as possible. First, do it in English to get used to the idea. Then in Czech. Slow down more and more.
Next vary the speed, pronounce one word very slowly and then the next one as fast as possible.
Start recording yourself. Record yourself while speaking very slow and then much faster. Is your pronunciation still as accurate at the higher speed? Again, speed without accuracy is no good.
>
One of the reasons varying speed is so useful is that it involves the whole body. Even if you are trying to speed up just in your mind, your posture changes (either literal or metaphorical). You become more involved, increase focus. And also reduce boredom.
### **Add rhythm**
As we started playing around with speed, we started to introduce elements of rhythm almost without trying. It is important to do this explicitly, to take advantage of the bodily nature of speed work.
There are many ways you can do this depending on the activity:
1. Start tapping a rhythm with your foot or hand
2. Create a chant that follow a certain rhythm (it could be a march or a flowing rhythm as in classical music or a choir)
3. Listen to different music in the background varying speed and beat (usually you want to keep it to instrumental music but in very physical activities music with words may be fine)
4. Use a metronome and set it to different speeds (there are many apps that will do this for you)
This is very easy to do with language. In fact, there are books published that do this for English (Jazz chants):
> To practice *knihy jsou*, you can:
1. sing it to a different songs
2. clap your hands at the start of each word
3. clap your hands at start of each syllable
>
Of course, you can and should combine speed and rhythm with all the other variations we’ve seen so far.
### **Substitution**
Substitution is essential. You cannot just repeat the same thing over and over. So, substitute the parts of the pattern you are repeating. Again, this is at the heart of language learning (and writing) but is common to most practice. To continue with the example above:
> The next step would be to learn to substitute other words into the same pattern *new*, *cheap*, *good* for *old*, or *here* for *over there.* And so on. You would then repeat them in different combinations until they the whole pattern becomes one flexible chunk you can read without processing individual components.
>
Substitution is essential when you want to progress and you want to build more generalised schemas. Repeating the same thing over and over without adding other contexts will not be enough to develop more general schemas.
For example, when learning a language, all the repetition we have done so far would work for a single sentence or maybe a handful of phrases that would serve you well on a holiday abroad. But not for a whole language.
### **Adding constraints and changing contexts**
> You have to train for making mistakes. James Hoffman, world barista champion [REF]
>
You almost never get to do what you do in ideal conditions. But it is not just matter of conditions, it is the variation in what you do. Your embodied mental schemas have to be flexible enough to adapt to new inputs or drive your change.
One very useful way to expand the flexibility of your mental schemas is to introduce constraints into your practice. These could be natural or artificial.
**Natural constraints** are the sort of things that may happen to you when you need to perform an action. For example, there may be noise, or you may be interrupted by pop ups on your computer. Or you may have limited time, or feel really exhausted.
You can focus on these in your practice. Practice in noisy conditions, have your email client or Twitter open next to your word processor and practice not looking at it. Or commit to writing 3 times for 10 minutes in a day rather than once for 30 minutes and do it after a meeting or after a meal.
This has to be deliberate. Do NOT use this as an excuse to have bad practice hygiene. Make sure that you identify a condition you are trying to practice and focus on designing practice conditions you want to improve it. You must also take note of your response to the disruption and improvement under those conditions.
Remember, it is not a good idea to introduce a lot of distraction into your practice routine without a purpose.
**Artificial constraints** are paradoxically more useful than natural constraints. They serve two purposes:
1. Provide more avenues of developing flexible and usable embodied schemas
2. Make practice more varied and enjoyable
There is a whole approach to coaching in some sports that is built around artificial constraints. For example, a catcher in a game may be thrown foam balls or players learning to catch balls have to catch irregular objects instead. Of course, they still practice with regular balls most of the time but these constraints serve to develop more flexibility.
Musicians will often practice with just one hand or by skipping certain keys on their instrument. A common practice for developing musical sensibility is to play expressively with just one or two notes.
In language related practice, like writing, there are many opportunities for introducing artificial constraints that will clearly help you develop different schemas better. Here are some examples:
- Avoid words beginning with letters H and W
- Don’t use the letter J at all
- Never start your sentence with a noun
- Write a paragraph where every last word in a sentence is a rhyme on the previous one
- Limit your sentences to 12 words
- Write every sentence with 32 words or more
- Write every other sentence from back to front
Unlike with the natural constraints which should be used sparingly and more deliberately, you can introduce artificial constraints more often just to spice up your practice routine. Because they are so artificial, they will not lead you to develop bad habits but will rather make you a more flexible performer.
### **Location and time changes**
One specialised way of adding constraints is to change locations and times of practice. Having stability is important to habit formation which help you ensure you practice regularly. For example, having a stable place to write or practice your vocabulary can be very useful. You may find it easier to get started and focus better when you are in your comfortable place. The same goes for having a regular schedule.
And you should spend significant time and effort to establish such times and places when you do your best work. Particularly, when you are starting out. But performance does not always happen in one time or place. And even if it did, you may not always be able to pick your time or place.
That’s why it is important to practice varying the time and place you do your practice. Again, this should not be something that may or may not happen. Be deliberate about it. If you find, that you can only do practice or work at a certain time and place, practice doing it at different times. For instance, write at the end of the day instead of at the beginning once a week. Or do your drills in the park or cafe, instead of a at home.
### **Adding meaning through visualisation**
As I keep repeating, pure repetition is not enough. We don’t get better any more after a while by mindlessly repeating the same thing. All the techniques we discussed so far will automatically inject a bit of reflection into your repetition. This will help you develop better, more flexible representations (embodied mental schemas) that will then become available to working memory as usable chunks when you need them.
It seems that these chunks can be very large and one thing that makes them richer and more usable is meaning. It is easy to loose sight of the meaning as you are repeating what you are doing - even when you vary the repetition. But you should always keep your practice meaningful.
Visualisation is a powerful way to inject meaning into your practice. As you are practicing, thing about using the skill in a real context. Imagine your conversation partner, imagine your readers, or imagine the place you will run through. If you watch professional skiers before a race, you will see that alongside stretching and warming, they have their eyes closed and move their body in different shapes. They are running the course in their mind - they are using visualisation.
Do that as often as possible.
Not everyone can easily recall rich images in their mind at will. But you can always rehearse the context verbally in your head. Just think about all the steps you have to take. There are two ways to add meaning through visualisation:
1. **Internal to the activity:** Visualise the time and place where you do something. Think about the people around you, think about the purpose, think about what it will look like during or after. This could as simple as saying: ‘when I sit at my computer, I will click here to open Word, and then click in the last paragraph and start writing’ or it could be more elaborate. But when you practice, always think about what it will look and feel like when you do it in the real context. For example, when you are practicing vocabulary with a flashcard, think about using the word or phrase in context. But that does not just mean “in a sentence”. Visualise yourself saying or writing this in a real situation or several. Visualisation is like free travel.
2. **External to the activity:** Not all of your visualisation has to be about what you are practicing. Sometimes you can use mnemonic devices to build useful associations. That is how the famous ‘mental palace technique’ works. You associate the thing you want to remember with a powerful image, so that it is easier to recall, focus and remove other distractions. But that is also how motivational mantras work. As you are practicing, think to yourself about how much you are going to enjoy being better at what you are doing. Then when you are doing it, you can think back and appreciate all the work you’ve done. It’s a virtuous cycle.
### **Practicing to practice**
All of the techniques for improving practice are skills. And skills need practice to get better at them. This is how scaffolding works. If you want to build a building, you have to build a scaffold to help you. Without it, you can’t build the building. But it is work, it takes time and resources.
So, you should spend some time to practice your practice techniques. Reflect on whether you are doing them right and what you could improve. You don’t have to spend a lot of time on most of them but allocate about 5% of your practice time to this.
Sometimes, the technique itself is so complicated that it is its own skill. Or at least for some people. For example, many beginning musicians struggle to use the metronome or to count to help them keep rhythm. That in itself is a skill to develop and requires its own practice even if it is not something to use during performance.
The same goes for tools such as apps for writing or note taking. They all require their own level of skill that needs to be performed with certain minimal level of fluency and accuracy. Much of the time people just achieve those after a few repeats. But if you find, that you can only do practice or work at a certain time and place, practice doing it at different times. For general, people underestimate how much better their other work could be, if they practiced to use their tools a bit more.
### **Intentionality**
One last thing that will make repetition more powerful is intentionality. You are practicing with the intention of improving your performance. You are not doing it for the sake of practice. You are not doing it just as a random mindless repetition during every day activity.
You are introducing a certain amount of intentionality just by calling it practice. But you can do even more. Think explicitly about what your repetition is doing to improve your mental schemas. Focus on that and evaluate it from that perspective. You may think of it as a special kind of visualisation (meta visualisation).
Intentionality is also another way of introducing focus and attention into your practice. Those are both really important but they take a lot of effort and not-everybody finds that easy. By doing something with the intention of improving your working memory, you will find that you are more mindful of how distractions interfere with that.
One way to help intentionality is to set a timer and log what you are doing. That simple action tells your body that this is about something different. People still do get distracted and this is something that you may need to practice. But it is worth it. Tell yourself that you will not look at email, turn on music, go get a cup of coffee, during the time the timer is running (anywhere between 5 and 50 minutes). And practice how long you can do it. Make setting the timer a part of the ritual - a trigger for intentional, focused work.
You can even introduce intentionality into your regular practice. Just pause sometimes, redo an action you just did while thinking about how you could do it slightly better. Repeat it once more to see, if you change made a difference.
---
> Section 15 of 21 · Techniques for Reflection · id `reflection-feedback` · [read in the reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=reflection-feedback)
# Four techniques for reflection to gather feedback
## Reflection and feedback gathering methods
Reflection is the necessary companion to repetition. Without reflection and deliberation, the time you spend repeating to practice is mostly wasted. But you must not just ponder, your reflection should aim to examine the feedback you got from the result of your performance.
You should be reflecting on how your practice contributes to your performance and how it could improve further. You are practicing to improve, not to practice. Here are some techniques you can use:
1. Introspection
2. Diary or log
3. Comparison
4. Discussion
## **1 Introspection**
The easiest method is introspection. Simply examine your performance in your mind. You can do systematically or randomly. You will find that the people who are good at something are thinking about it much of their time. The people at the top of their game probably think of little else. They think about their progress, what they could do to improve, reflect on what they did, etc.
If you find yourself thinking a lot about writing or language or whatever you are doing, this may be all the introspection you need. But most people need to be more systematic. Schedule time during each practice to think about how it went. Do think you have finished until you have reflected on the quality of what you did and what to do next.
And if you remember during odd moments, think about how you are progressing and how your practice is doing overall. But do not think in general terms, try to be as specific as possible. Try to plan what you are going to practice next time.
But introspection has the same limits of working memory as everything. There’s only so much you can keep in your head. That’s when you need to introduce record keeping.
## **2 Diary or log**
Keeping a log is essential for tracking progress but it is also useful to keep a diary with more detailed thoughts or plans.
This could be very simple - write down what you did, how it went and what you will do next time. This may take some effort but it is worth it. Just like with writing itself, you will discover things you did not know about yourself by having to formulate them in writing - even if it is just bullet points.
During the process you will discover how easy it is to forget what you did even just a short time ago. You can use this opportunity to slow down, replay your practice in your mind and take note of what it was like. This will be an incredibly useful method of improving your ability to perceive how well you are doing. The process of writing it out explicitly will show you how many things you left unexamined.
## **3 Comparison or benchmarking**
No matter what you are doing, there’s a good chance others are doing it, as well. You can use what they are doing as a benchmark - both practically and emotionally. It is almost certain that almost anything someone you know or know about can do, you can do also. Maybe not exactly the same way or to the same degree but at least a little bit.
The trick is to find someone who is just a little bit better than you and compare what you are doing to them. They are your benchmark of what is possible. Your aim is not to beat them or show them up. Your aim is to calibrate your expectation. Your mantra should be:
> If many people can do something well that I struggle with, I can probably practice to get better at it. It is much more likely that I just haven’t figured out how to practice it than “I am not good at it”.
>
This applies to everything. Running, driving, drawing, playing a musical instrument, doing math, speaking a foreign language, and of course, academic writing.
In many fields, you cannot compare yourself to the top performers - runners, chess players, musicians. At that level you need to combine enormous amounts of practice with some natural predisposition (or at least a specific life story that enabled them to start early enough). But there are always enough people who are just above you, whose level you can reach.
But with other fields, there is no easy notion of ‘the best’. This is most true of language in general and writing in particular. There is no reason why should not be able to compose any sentence or paragraph that anyone else can. And that you should not be able to do it quickly enough to compose just as good a paper or essay as them. You may vary in speed and total volume of output but that does not matter, the basic stuff of performance is well within your reach.
So the trick is to look at what those people are doing and think about what they did and then practicing to get to a point where you can replicate it. This is very easy with writing, because it is there in front of you and does not change.
A really good way to do benchmarking is to review the work of others in a group. This is something you can do with other people on the learning journey or, if you don’t know anybody, you can read reviews or watch videos assessing other people’s performance. This is available for music, photography, writing, many sports.
## **4 Discussion: Coaching and the limits to reflection**
There are limits to the amount of reflection you can do on your own. At the earliest stages, you don’t yet have enough ability to perceive all aspects of what you are doing. This is when it helps to work with a coach.
When we say the word “coach” we imagine someone who tells you what to do. But that is wrong. If that was all coaches did, we could learn from a step by step guide. In fact, the reason Couch to 5K works so reliably is because anybody following those steps can get those gains.
No, the reason to have a coach is to have someone to help you with reflection. Everything else a coach does such as setting out a programme or motivating you is just a bonus. You can mostly get those things for yourself with the help of textbooks of instructional videos. What you cannot get is that external perception of what you are doing. Even when you record yourself, you are not quite at the level where you can perceive all the problems. You can bootstrap your way to this level but a coach is a great shortcut.
You don’t always have somebody called ‘coach’ in your field. For example, there are writing coaches but they are few and far between. But you can always use a ‘teacher’ as a coach, too. Even in a class situation. Don’t go to class waiting for the teacher to tell you what to do and what to learn. Go there to get feedback on your performance. Do all the exercises and more and listen carefully to what the teacher tells you. They may not even realise that they are coaching you.
Or you can always find somebody who is just a little better than you or even at the same level as you to give you feedback as an input into your reflection. The feedback can even be wrong and still be useful for reflection. Remember, you are using a coach as a source of improved self-reflection to help you achieve more productive repetition. They cannot do the repetition for you and they cannot do the reflection for you, either. But they can be a great catalyst or accelerator.
And finally, a coach, a teacher or even a class can give structure to your practice. People often complain about their teachers or classes. They say things like - ‘the teacher didn’t teach me what I need’ or ‘I never learn anything in class’. You can turn any class into a personal coaching session just by changing your perspective. This is a time to help you reflect on your practice and performance.
---
> Section 16 of 21 · Dealing with Emotions · id `emotions` · [read in the reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=emotions)
# Dealing with emotions: Finding joy in boring practice
## What does practice feel like - finding joy in the “grind”
Practice and the learning associated with it is not just a mechanical step by step process. It is also an emotional process. And being able to expect, deal with and even manage the emotional load is as important as managing the cognitive load.
There are broadly two sources of emotions associated with practice:
1. Feelings about progress and skill level
2. Feelings during and about the practice activities
These are often intertwined but it is useful to think of them separately.
## Progress curve emotional rollercoaster
Being good at something is not just something that happens. We grow a skill almost like another limb. It becomes a part of us, our identity and most importantly our comfort zone. Pushing outside of that comfort zone is by definition uncomfortable.
We feel emotions when we enter a new field and we feel emotions when we try to improve.
### **Beginner shock**
It is no fun to be a beginner. You may enjoy the novelty of learning something new for a while but soon you will start to feel like a foreigner lost in a far away land without a guide. Nothing makes sense, you feel like a child or you may start even questioning your own self worth.
Many of the emotions people go as they try to acquire a new skill or move to the next level are very similar to what people go through with culture shock. They not only feel bad, they feel physically and mentally tired, they withdraw and they may even develop a hatred of the new thing.
This may sound extreme, but many people who gave up something often did it because it did not make them feel good about themselves. The initial excitement wore off and all that remained was drudgery. The difference between those who succeeded and those who gave up is that those who succeeded found a way to cope with the negative emotions and in the best case found a way to enjoy the process practice.
Here the lesson is:
### **Plateau comfort and regression stress**
Reaching a plateau is another source of negative feelings. The most common strategy for coping with this is that people think there’s no room to improve. They reached a sufficient level and they do not need to improve. This is probably true for most things in life - we can only improve at so many things. But it is not true in absolute terms. We can always improve at anything we do in one way or another. Even people at the top of their game (or perhaps especially those people) are always looking for ways to improve.
But another thing that happens is even more important and frequent source of why people don’t like leaving the comfort zones of their plateaus is that the first thing that happens as you try to improve some aspect of your performance is that you first get worse at it.
Sometimes this is obvious. For example, I would like to improve my typing by using a more efficient control of the keys. What will happen when I embark on a learning programme - my typing speed will decrease. I am happy with my typing speed - the main reason I want to type more efficiently is to reduce stress on my hands - so I don’t want to go through the pain. The immediate gain is too removed and the work involved too extensive.
But I will take the time to learn keyboard shortcuts of any new application I’m using because I know the benefit is huge and I have a good system for learning them, so the cost of time and effort is small. Many people find that too much work and will forego the benefit.
But sometimes the regression is hidden. I’m experiencing a change to my routines and I am starting to perceive the limits of my current performance. This causes more general tiredness and stress - so my performance suffers as a result in the short term - or very often the perceived effort of anything I do increases and I feel like my performance is less even when it is improving on any objective measure. That’s one of the reasons logging and keeping track of feedback is so important.
## Practice activities or Love the grind
The most important thing to know about effective practice is that it mostly is not inherently enjoyable. In fact, not only is it not enjoyable, it can be emotionally draining and dispiriting as we saw above. When we talk about learning being fun, we are often talking about motivation. But the process of learning cannot be all fun.
Repeating something over and over while focusing on doing it as best as possible does not sound like fun because it is not. But it is possible to find enjoyment in it. Many people say they enjoy the pain of exercise because they know it is helping, they know they will feel better after, they like the structure it gives their life, or because they found joy in the moment.
Those who are lucky enough to find the joy on their own will be more likely to succeed. But that joy can be trained with reflection. Many of us did not start by liking coffee or wine but ‘developed a taste for it’. This was not by accident. We saw people enjoying these things and tried to replicate it. And most people succeeded in this. The same can be done with practice.
One surprisingly powerful way to develop enjoyment is mantras - short statements you develop and repeat to yourself while you are performing the activity. It could be as simply as saying to yourself “I’m enjoying this” or “this is getting better”. Many athletes use mantras during performance as a way of focusing and overcoming issues. One of the strategies they use, is prepare and practice their mantras ahead of time to get used to them and try them in context. Yes, even mantras can be practiced and improved.
Repeating a mantra to yourself while writing or speaking would not always be helpful, but you can use them when you are tired or don’t feel like getting started. They don’t have to be words. They can be images or sounds you bring up in your head. Different people have different things that work for them, don’t feel like you have to use exactly the same thing - try what works for you (and, yes, practice it).
## Studying vs practicing
Another insight on the question of practice and emotion comes from a surprising place - speed cubing. T Perm a champion speed cuber who makes instructional videos on speed cubing on YouTube observed that he sees two types of players with different preferences [REF]:
1. **Studying:** Learning new and new ways of doing something
2. **Practicing:** Repeating existing ways and getting really good at them
He associated the former with older players and the latter with older ones. His claim is that practicing is usually more successful because if you only study without practice, you never develop the speed you need. Those who study new algorithms in speed cubing ignore aspects like improving their finger position on those they already know, or speed of recognition of existing patterns.
Both are necessary to success but without practice, the studying is not enough. This was echoed by a teacher of bluegrass [REF] who observed a similar distinction in musicians and pointed out that this difference has an emotional dimension. Some people are more comfortable learning new concepts and find the ‘grind’ of repeating and improving one thing too tedious. But they end up with a large musical vocabulary they cannot use.
While this is not intrinsically linked to age, we can see that the older and more removed from the school age, the less we would be inclined to repeat something over and over. The sort of repetition that is required for successful practice just pushes us too far out of our emotional comfort zone.
## Benchmarking emotions and practice
Most of the time we only see expert performers at their best where we see them perform activities that seem far outside of what is imaginable for us. They make it look easy. We often admire them for the ease with which they seemingly do what they do.
But we are confusing ease for fluency. Fluency is not easy, it takes a lot of work. Luckily, in the age of YouTube and podcasts we have much more access to the experiences of elite performers as they share what they do and how with the rest of the world. And the message is clear: they suffer, they have doubts, they get tired, they hit plateaus.
We understand that they have to put in hours of practice but never consider how they feel during it. This is important. Your feelings while you are learning are the most likely reason you won’t practice. You may supress them by avoiding it altogether or you will be surprised by them and think you are doing something wrong.
It is important to benchmark your emotions - find out about what people in your field say, take it seriously when they talk about feelings. Here’s a personal example.
Most people would consider me good at learning foreign languages. I can usually get to a a very basic conversational level after a few weeks that seems to take many people a few months. People say things ‘you have a good memory’ or ‘you are good at languages’. That is not true at all. I have figured out a way to practice a language in context (using many of the techniques above). I am confident that I can do this with any language given enough incentive. However, it is a painful process. To help others understand it, I once kept a diary of the first two months of my learning Albanian [REF] and you can see how painful and frustrating the process was. I was not as deliberate about it as I could have been but the difference between me and others around me was that I was doing the work and I’d had the confidence that it would work out. The reason I kept the diary was to set a benchmark for what is possible but more important what it feels like. The message was, learning can be done even by somebody who actually does not have a good memory or (as my school teachers can attest), is not good at studying languages. They were not always feeling positive.
So, if you are feeling negative emotions during the learning process, you can be confident that others are feeling the same.
---
> Section 17 of 21 · Overcoming Working Memory · id `limitations-working-memory` · [read in the reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=limitations-working-memory)
# Deliberate practice as a way of overcoming limitations of working memory
### Deliberate practice background
Deliberate practice has gained a lot of attention recently as a way of developing and improving expert performance without reference to innate predispositions such as talent. Of course, certain innate as well as environmental predispositions will play a role, particularly when it comes to the differentiation of performance at the very peak. The height of basketball players is often given as example [ref]. However, the key lesson of deliberate practice is that the lack of talent or merely not being naturally "good at" something does not prevent someone from achieving a significant level of competence.
Deliberate practice has been the subject of many popular books, as well as academic treatments [ref] and was summarised by its originator Anders Ericsson in Peak [ref]. However, many of these books and countless articles and blogposts focus on the process. They emphasise things like getting feedback, working with coaches, breaking tasks into smaller components, working in short focused spurts. And that is all good advice. However, it ignores what I believe is the main and most **revolutionary contribution of deliberate practice**. Namely, redefining the goal of skill acquisition as the building of mental representations in order to overcome the universal limitations of working memory.
### Mental representations and chunks
What are mental representations? Most simply mental representations are chunks that can be held in working memory and with which we can perform operations in order to achieve the task. Or in other words, articulate our intent. The idea goes back to GA Miller's seminal paper from 1956 "The Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus 2". In it., Miller talks about what appears to be fundamental limit of working (or in his words "immediate") memory in that it can only hold approximately 7 pieces of information. The precise number has been debated over the years [ref] but the fact that a small finite limit exists is beyond doubt. However, and this is where Miller's and Ericsson's insights merge, is that there does not seem to be any meaningful limit to the size of these pieces. They are not bits of information but rather chunks, or in Ericsson's terms "mental representations".
Both chunks and mental representations are terminologically laden and subject to confusion across various research traditions. I will use them interchangeably simply to mean pieces of mental or physical performance that can be held in working memory in such a way that they can be manipulated without need for further articulation. To give trivial examples. To express the plural of the word "dog", we need to add the suffix "s" which is furthermore pronounced /z/ due to the coarticulation with the preceding consonant. All of those components need to be successfully articulated. Yet, the only demand of saying 'dogs' on working memory is topronounce /dogz/. We could go through the same step by step analysis of an entire sentence such as "The dogs are barking." where not only do we need to produce this articulation for each individual word and also their interaction and that of the sentence as a whole. But all that is required of working memory is to deal with a unitary chunk. The sentence "the dogs are barking".
The same applies to primarily physical tasks such as driving. Shifting gears consists of a number of physical steps but the driver is only minimally competent when she can perform them as one. The process is then incorporated into the process of turning and slowing down which includes changing gears and its many subarticulations but also assessing the situation, turning the wheel, etc.
### Mental representations and expertise
What sets apart experts from lay performers is the size of the chunks upon which they can confidently operate. For example a racecar driver, can perform all of the actions involved in shifting gears while turning under conditions of stress. All this at high speed while paying attention to her competitors, instructions from the navigator and while planning manoeuvres, several hundred or even thousand meters hence.
A sports commentator can produce a continuous flow of relevant and coherent speech for extended periods of time while paying attention to what goes on on the field, technical aspects of the broadcasting equipment and instructions from the production team [ref Goffman]. Yet, when these and other experts' working memory is tested, they are not found to exceed the limitations identified by Miller [ref].
It is not only the raw size of the mental representations but also their richness. For instance, mnemonic devices are often used to facilitate recall. What this means that one has to remember more things in order to learn something simpler. Memory champions often focus on creating rich associations to facilitate memory, thus increasing the richness of the chunks they hold in working memory without increasing the demands on memory capacity. [ref - Moonwalking with Einstein]
This also explains why there are limits to the transferrability of expertise between different domains or sometimes even different situations [ref]. The mental representations, in order to be useful for their primary task of reducing the working memory load, must be richly embedded in their environment which in turn also introduces new demands on working memory. For instance, public performances of music require additional practice compared to solitary playing. Equally, any foreign language learner will have experienced the notion of being tongue tied when faced with a real situation, even using language that they acquired perfectly in the classroom [ref Goin in Brown]. Practice therefore needs to be focused on the performance of the skill in real context. We can also use this phenomenon to explain why teaching to the test works and fails to produce actual skill without additional focus.
### Deliberate practice as method
Deliberate practice can then be best understood as a method for increasing the size and richness of mental representations or chunks in a particular domain of expertise. However, the realization that this is the goal of practice, and then learning how to identify the next mental representations to develop are just as important as the techniques associated with the process of practice, if not more. Without chunks or mental representations as the clear goal, deliberate practice can devolve into meaningless repetition.
What then is the nature of deliberate practice? First, Ericsson [ref] differentiates between purposeful practice and deliberate practice. However, his use of the terms is inconsistent [ref] and for the sake of simplicity, I will use deliberate practice to include activities that are primarily characteristics of purposeful practice which Ericsson sees as being more effective than pure repetition but less effective than full deliberate practice. However, when trying to apply deliberate practice to areas outside its original scope, these fine distinction would be more detrimental than beneficial. It is important to keep in mind that such differentiation exists when exploring the concept further.
The key characteristic of deliberate practice is focused repetition of performing the component of a skill in question. The success depends on timely feedback and guidance from a coach. The feedback needs to lead to a revision of the performance as well as the reassessment of the desired building blocks of the skill. Deliberate practice is most likely to be successful if the learner follows an established programme of study supported by an experienced coach who exceeds the learner's level of competence.
The role of the coach is important in order to increase effectiveness of the practice in that the coach can provide feedback and suggest ways of correcting performance. This is essential at the peak levels of expert performance where any improvement is going to be small and require extreme focus and effort to achieve. Since the concept of deliberate practice came at least in part out of research of elite performers, the focus on coaching and training programmes is a big part of the literature. However, in order to make deliberate practice accessible in non-elite, less resources contexts, it is essential that alternatives to coaching be identified.
The literature suggests a number of approaches. Peer coaching and feedback has been shown to be particularly effective. However, using automated feedback instruments - for instance, music or language apps - can also serve to provide actionable feedback. The learner can also benefit from recording their performance (music, physical activities, foreign language) or keeping track of measurable aspects of performance where recording is not practicable (number of errors, time, routine maintenance). Finally, significant performance improvements can also be gained simply by following an established routine. Here, the famous example is the Couch to 5K running programmes that can take most beginners from no ability to run to being able to run 5 kilometres in approximately 8 weeks.
There is no one established description of the steps of deliberate practice but for the purposes of further discussion, we can summarise it as follows.
1. Identify performance target and the mental representations or chunks required for performance within the limits of working memory. At some levels, this may only be possible with the help of a coach or a teacher. The performance target also needs to be frequently revised as intermediate stages are reached and the learners ability to perceive their own performance changes.
2. Identify components of mental representations (levels of performance) to provide target for practice. This may include scaffolding, i.e. practicing skills required for the acquisition of the skill rather than the skill itself (for instance acquiring a metalanguage, ability to count time in music, or developing a practice routine). In skills, where performance is not immediately susceptible to measurement, identify measurable aspects of performance or a way of recording progress in order to receive feedback.
3. Practice component chunks in a focused way until their component actions stop requiring individual attention. This requires repetition with close focus on small details of performance. The level of focus required means that this level of practice cannot be sustained for long periods and can only be effective if performed regularly in relatively small chunks of 30-60 minutes. Practice should always be slightly above the current level of skill. Ideally, at the level where the learner can perceive the target performance. The actual practice techniques will vary by the target performance, the current skill level and interest of the individual. In most areas, there are likely to be many different practice techniques that can lead to successful acquisition of the required mental representations.
4. Measure progress regularly by reviewing when multistep-actions become single performance chunks. This step may require some creativity in areas not naturally susceptible to measurement. Some areas, such as sport and musical performance have established assessment metrics. In sport, aspects of performance such as speed, distance or weight are not only inherently measurable but also can form the target for improvement. However, in most areas any measurement will only be a proxy for progress. It is essential to avoid the trap of confusing the measure with the target performance. The only true measure of progress is the ability to perform operations on the acquired mental representations in working memory as single chunks. Where this is not susceptible to external observation or reflected in a measurement proxy, introspection will be required of the learner.
5. Review target mental representations and identify non-performance scaffolding chunks. One of the most common mistakes is to confuse the performance target with certain stages required to achieve it. For instance, acquiring metalanguage or other metacognitive apparatus is necessary to be able to effectively monitor progress or identify areas to focus on. However, that is rarely part of the performance itself. For instance, memorising vocabulary is an essential part of learning a language. However, recalling words in response to a prompt is a separate performance to speaking a language. Fluent speakers do not 'recall' words, they use them to achieve their communicative goals. It is therefore always essential to focus on the context of performance.
### Identifying and monitoring mental representations
On this account of deliberate practice, identifying and monitoring mental representations is essential to learning. However, no systematic study has been done of mental representations across various areas. There is not even a coherent theoretical account of mental representations. In fact, even research on working memory building on Miller's initial insight has mostly stalled [ref].
The identification of the mental representations has mostly been left to practitioners. The target mental representations are often left implicit in the practice guides or didactic manuals. However, it would appear that any one performance level can be achieved via different progress routes and any skill can be broken down into different chunks for successful performance. There are obvious limits to the variability but it is not necessary to assume that all learners need to follow identical paths or even focus on exactly the same chunks as targets for practice.
This is most important when considering the starting point for any activity.
### Transfer of mental representations across tasks
As hinted, mental representations or chunks only transfer in a limited way across domains. The transfer only happens if two different performances of a task share a similar articulation. The mental representation required for fluent spelling or basic grammatical structures such as agreement or basic morphology transfer across all writing tasks. However, going from writing down sentences to fluently composing a coherent paragraph of academic English is an entirely independent journey of acquiring mental representations. But even at that level, different genres or contexts will require different mental representations.
Academics find it notoriously difficult to write for the general public. That is because the chunks built up to write an academic papers are unsuitable for the press. And new chunks have to be developed. Both tasks are articulated through a certain level of syntactic complexity that makes the transfer easier but ultimately, the process is akin to learning a foreign language.
This same issue is present across all domains of expertise. Chess players cannot just pick up Go and succeed. Medical diagnosticians cannot easily diagnose difficulties with their computers. Even though in both cases, the abstract principles that emerge when the task is described as a feat of reason are almost identical. Yet, the mental representations required to actually perform the reasoning within the limits of working memory make the transfer almost impossible.
This could also explain why generalist managers so often struggle across significantly different domains. While in practice there are both successes and failures [ref], the successes can only be possible if the manager develops sufficient fluency about their new field. But equally, this explains why domain experts frequently make inadequate managers. While they can easily conceptualise the set of actions required for success, they never acquired mental representations to reason with sufficient fluency about the process through which they can be achieved.
The lesson is that the primary focus of any practice should be acquiring mental representations for the task at hand. And as we saw above, successfully identifying the task and the requisite mental representations is a key component of successful deliberate practice
### Mental representations and perception
From the above, it is clear that mental representations also have an impact on perception. Experts can not only produce and operate with larger chunks, they can also perceive larger chunks. An expert can see at a glance a complex situation and identify the problem whereas a novice needs to decode their world step by step, in a manner much more similar to a computer algorithm. For instance, a master chess player will see a very complex board configuration and immediately see the outcome without having to consider individual configuration of pieces. Concert musicians frequently see entire sections of a complex score as simply one element whereas a novice would have to decode every individual note.
This is, of course, trivially true of reading and writing at the lower levels of articulation. Obviously, expert readers can operate at higher speed and focus on more aspects of text other than simply the decoding of sequences of letters into mental images of words or their aural representations. However, expert readers of academic literature can pay attention to many more aspects of the text, they can skim, scan and make judgements at a glance. An expert reader of academic literature will also see be able to make connections, understand contexts and make more informed decisions about which parts of text to pay special attention to. This is also relevant to the writing process since a more expert reader will be able to better edit their own writing. Although it needs to be pointed out that the task of editing and test revision is different from reading for content and the transfer is not complete. However, some level of expertise in reading a text in a specific genre will be required for editing.
The same applies even in more complex areas such as medical diagnostics, emergency response, strategy, teaching, management, however, it has not been studied much outside of medical diagnostic fields and surgery.
It is important to note the great controversy around the impact of mental representations on perception. However, the claim here is not that the expert is "literally" seeing or hearing something different than the non-expert. The expert merely requires less time and fewer steps to process the relevant information whereas a novice will require so much time and so many step that their working memory will be effectively swamped and the effect will be some species of "attentional blindness". [ref]
### Mental representations and automaticity
This requires an important caveat. What I have been describing could lead us to assume that the goal of deliberate practice is automaticity. The ability to perform tasks without thinking about them. This might be reminiscent of the famous distinction between levels of competence based on meta-cognition or awareness: Unconscious Incompetence, Conscious Incompetence, Conscious Competence, Unconscious Competence. It might appear, that deliberate is a process of achieving unconscious competence. But nothing could be further from the truth.
It is true that some levels of articulation form mental representations that are beyond the scope of conscious notice [ref Talmy]. For instance, articulation of phonemes in fluent speech is an example of competence that is not only unconscious but cannot be made conscious by an expert speaker without explicit training. However, almost any effort through which we might want to acquire mental representations will not focus on articulations of this kind.
While it is not based on research or theory [ref], this framework makes intuitive sense and is frequently deployed in training. The assumption is that unconscious competence is the target of instruction. It bears noting that in the original conception of this metaphor, this was not the case. It was first used to describe missionary educators and those with conscious competence were given as the examples of more effective practitioners [ref]. But true expertise requires a much more nuanced perspective that can be guided by the focus on the limitations of working memory.
In order to be able to reason and act in a sufficiently fluent manner, the expert cannot consciously attend to all the component mental representations required to perform the action. And as noted, at lower levels of articulation, this is impossible. However, this does not mean that the chunks or mental representations have become opaque monads to them. They can still make parts of their articulated structure available for inspection while attending to their use. The structure of the chunk and the chunk itself create a larger chunk which can be operated on in working memory.
In short, experts do not perform actions automatically without thinking, they perform them deliberately while using larger and richer chunks. To an outside observer, it may appear effortless or almost extrasensory in terms of perception. And experts frequently describe themselves thus. But when the expert performance is analysed, the structure and use of mental representations become much clearer. In short, the expert needs to both have access to the structure of their mental representations and operate on them as if they were monadic units.
### Practice, enjoyment and motivation
The final consideration for deliberate practice is that it is unlikely to be inherently enjoyable due to the level of focus required. This is made worse by the fact that the particular thing practiced may not be directly meaningful and only serve as a scaffold. For instance, repeating scales in different patterns does not feel like playing music, or memorising vocabulary does not seem like speaking a language.
Ericsson reports that successful practitioners learn to find enjoyment in the process, particularly with respect to the progress. Given the amount of effort required, maintaining motivation is essential. Again, there is no definitive prescription for this but the most common suggestion is to monitor progress and reassess goals in order to receive perceptible performance rewards. This can develop a positive feedback loop, since monitoring progress is essential to the process of deliberate practice.
However, there is also a danger of circularity. It is a common side effect of gamification where the goal of obtaining the performance reward supersedes that of learning. For instance, learners using gamified vocabulary apps may focus on achieving high scores and optimise the process for achieving those as opposed for building a repository of words they can use. The measurement of progress must include a reflection of how the change in skill contributes to the ultimate goal of building larger chunks.
It is important that learners find ways to make repeated focused practice not just bearable but also enjoyable. This can include various rewards and varying the practice routine. Practicing in different tempos, with and without background music, etc. can reduce some of the tedium of the repetition required. But ultimately, the main source of enjoyment needs to be from the fact that the practice leads to improvement on the journey to the final goal. Seeing the results of practice in actual performance will be the greatest motivator.
To paraphrase the virtuoso bassist Victor Wooten from an interview he gave on stage:
> Don't think about how bad you feel now when it seems like you will never get it. Think about how great you'll feel next week, when you'll be able to do this.
>
The importance of this for writing was stated most clearly by Basboll [ref] who suggests that finding enjoyment in the act of writing should be one of the goals of the process of practice. In his words, "enjoyment is a trainable skill". This can be achieved by periodic reflection on the benefits of the "writing moment", the focused time when writing or writing practice is the main focus.
### Variability in effects of repetition and aptitude
One of the commonly recognised realities of instruction is the variability in how individuals respond to the same instruction across different subjects. Some people seemingly develop mental representations in certain fields by mere repetition, sometimes without any outward effort.
First, we know that that some chunks and mental representations do develop simply by repetition in almost anyone engaging in them repeatedly. Any typist will improve their speed over time, an adult studying a foreign language will acquire new words, beginner drivers will improve over time in how they navigate traffic and handle the vehicle. Sometimes a few repetitions suffice to develop a sufficient mental representation.
When a person moves into a new home, they will go through a period of small adjustments. Initially, even turning the lights on or opening doors requires conscious effort. Yet, in a matter of days of weeks, one develops sufficient "fluency" in performing these actions that they become automatic. Instead of looking for the light switch, thinking about which light it turns on, which way the toggle goes to turn it on, the action of switching on the light is one thing. I walk into a room with the intention of turning the light on and my body will perform the action of turning the light on as if it were one. Repetition over time was all that was necessary, although the process will involve some amount of conscious reflection.
However, mere repetition is not sufficient to overcome the inevitable performance plateaus. After reaching a plateau, performance stops improving or may even degrade over time. But perhaps even more importantly, individuals will differ in their ability to build mental representations in a given field by mere repetition. This is perhaps what can best be described as aptitude or talent. While the basic tenet of deliberate practice is that within certain limits no general human skill is outside the reach of anyone engaging in practice aimed at developing mental representations, it would be hard to deny that individuals differ.
For instance, the development of reading or writing skills at all levels displays a large degree of variability across all levels from primary school to academic writing. Individuals exposed to by and large the same instruction develop differently. However, most people develop sufficient reading and writing skills through instruction that is primarily conceptual followed by procedural repetition with no focus on building mental representations. Yet, the requisite mental representations do develop in a large proportion of the population. But equally a significant minority will never develop sufficient fluency in reading and an even larger proportion will never become fluent writers. The disparity is even higher in analogous procedural skills such as mathematics or foreign languages, or even physical activities such as sports or musical performance.
What accounts for this variability is a matter of speculation but traditionally it has been ascribed to aptitude or talent. In reading and writing, often the disparity is a result of specific cognitive impairments such as dyslexia or SLI. However, even these limitations can be overcome with a structured approach to instruction where mental representations are cumulatively built up under the careful supervision of the teacher acting as coach.
In cases, where the variability cannot be explained by recognisable cognitive or physical limitations, the differences may be attributed to a difference in how repetition is engaged in by the individual in the given subject. Most likely explanation is a positive feedback loop between initial success of building the foundational mental representations leading to the accessibility of further practice. These individuals are more likely to engage in more reflection about the process which further enhances what may be externally perceived as mere practice through repetition.
This is important for developing academic or non-academic writing skills. Words such as talented writer are often used to talk about certain individuals. Yet, this often ignores the amount of reflection these individuals engage in in their practice and how it increase the amount of repetition which further develops these skills. Struggling writers will need to be reminded of this fact.
### Time required for developing mental representations
Another issue not sufficiently addressed in the literature is the time required to convert component actions into chunks that can be operated on by working memory. The total number of 10,000 hours has been suggested [ref] as the typical amount of time required to achieve peak performance levels in certain fields. Ericsson suggests it takes multiple years, as many as 10, during which deliberate practice is the main focus, to achieve peak performance skill. This is clearly not realistic advice for most instances because it only focuses on peak performers and does not consider the fact that most people only need to develop a skill to a much lower level of performance in order for it to become useful for their aims.
However, no evidence-based guidelines exist for the amount of time required to develop such useful and usable mental representations. But we can turn to an estimate by Josh Kaufman [ref] who suggests that it takes 20 hours to develop basic mental representations in a field of effort. He presents several case studies of personal development where 20 hours over the course of about 4-6 weeks helped him develop usable skills in a domain. For instance, he reports learning to play four chords on a ukulele, learn yoga to improve his mobility, learn basics of a new programming language, and learn to type using a new keyboard layout.
While no research exists to confirm this estimate, we can triangulate this approximate time span by comparing similar instructional programmes. For instance, the famous running programme Couch to 5k (C25K) succeeds in developing running skills over the course of 9 weeks and a total of about 15 hours of practice. A summer school in a foreign language may offer students about 30 hours of meaningful practice over the course of two weeks. The Writing Process Reengineering programme discussed below is designed to run over 8 weeks with a total starting at about 20 hours. 20 hours over 8 weeks is also the approximate amount of instruction received by students in an academic subject over the course of a semester.
As a broad estimate, we that anyone engaging in 15 - 40 hours of deliberate practice over the course of 2 to 10 weeks can develop sufficient combination mental representations or chunks that can be operated on in working memory in order to allow them to legitimately perform in a field albeit where they previously had no competence at all. This performance will be significantly limited and it will take many repetitions of these learning sprints to achieve even moderate levels of expert performance. However, this gives a realistic estimate on the lower bound of time for deliberate practice. This can then be transformed into usable programmes for developing academic writing skills or other analogous procedural skills.
---
> Section 18 of 21 · Metaphors of Writing · id `metaphors-writing` · [read in the reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=metaphors-writing)
# Metaphors of Writing for Deliberate Practice
### Writing as a foreign language
From the perspective of a novice writer, writing is effectively a foreign language [ref Jim Miller, genre research]. The conventions and structures of the written language often effectively constitute a different language, not only at the level of vocabulary or syntax but even at the level of type [ref]. For instance, the type of nominalisation common in academic and bureaucratic language is reminiscent of the difference between incorporating and non-incorporating languages [ref Haspelmath].
This is further underscored when we realise that, it is possible for non-native speakers to write quite fluently in an academic register without being able to demonstrate anywhere near the level of idiomatic fluency in daily conversation.
The main difference between writing and learning a foreign language is that the native speaker learning to produce written language is not building their linguistic representations from scratch and can therefore draw on existing chunks of articulation. However, as Dabrowska demonstrated [ref], there are clear limits to how native speakers can deal with written language of increasing complexity. Learning to write clearly requires reading to construct quite different chunks of language than learning to speak. For many writers, this happens naturally through repetition but others require more targeted practice.
What this means for writing is that the identification of mental representations will be similar to that when learning a foreign language. And indeed most academic writing guides focus on this almost to the exclusion of anything else. They provide lists of words, phrases and constructions to be acquired very much like a foreign language [ref - examples]. Equally, Academic English courses are often provided by the Language departments under the heading of EAP (English for Academic Purposes).
However, the question that remains largely unaddressed in writing, is the question of the communicative situation. The biggest challenge in foreign language instruction is to ensure that the learner can deploy the learned constructions at the moment of communication. This is both easier and harder with writing. Writing clearly does not impose the sort of time pressure with its concomitant imposition on the working memory. Unlike speaking, writing is not a irreversibly linear process. Indeed, it is often said that writing is in large part editing and rewriting.
At the same time, however, writing requires working with much larger chunks and the development of many layers of mental representations. This makes it easy for the writing tutor to inadvertently skip levels of articulation, leaving the student behind in their needs. This seems to happen to weaker students in the PROCESS approach [ref - systematic review].
### Writing as translation
> "we have all had the experience of uttering or writing a sentence, then stopping and realizing that it wasn't exactly what we meant to say. To have that feeling, there has to be a difference in what we meant to say from what we said." (Steven Pinker, Language Instinct)
>
Writing is clearly more than just putting the down the contents of one's thoughts on paper. Writers report not fully realizing what it was that they meant until it was written down. And rereading ones own writing often causes writers a sense of disconnect, not dissimilar to first hearing their speech on a recording. Fluent writing, requires that a writer develops mental representations (dual constructions) that constitute pairs of patterns of thought and patterns of written expression.
In this sense, writing is a kind of translation. To explore the metaphor further, we can imagine two languages: "mentalese" and "writtenese" between which the writer has to learn to translate. As any translator knows, translation is not a matter of finding one-to-one correspondences between words but rather equivalents between entire chunks of expression. Not everything is equally amenable to translation. Idioms, cultural allusions, complex imagery, puns are just a few of the types of constructions that can only ever be translated in part. The translator has to constantly make choices between being faithful to the structure of the author's language or to the author's intention. Both require a certain degree of interpretation.
But perhaps the most difficult challenge in translation is when the structure of one language requires the writer to commit to a meaning which the other language leaves unexpressed. In that case, the translator literally has to fill in gaps and make commitments to meaning which the original author did not have to do. This can even reveal inconsistencies and gaps in the original text. This could happen even in the most innocuous seeming constructions. For instance, the definition of the level A1 in the Common European Frame of Reference for languages (CEFR) begins: "Can understand and use familiar everyday expressions". Yet, the construction "understand and use" needs to be broken up into multiple clauses in some languages which may completely change the emphasis.
This is clearly very clearly reminiscent of the idea that writing is filling in gaps in ones thought. But at the same time some writers report that they find it relatively easy to write down the contents of their own thought. Some do it by rehearsing what they will write before setting it down, some may visualise the text as written first. Yet, others train their thought processes to more closely hew to what is written. But some adjustment is required.
This is one aspect of writing least susceptible to explicit instruction because it is impossible to give examples of the contents of somebody's mind without these having been processed through writing. However, there are parallels such as those between written and spoken language or two different languages. This can then help the student identify possible mental representations which can then be developed through deliberate practice.
Thomas Basboll has also been exploring the related metaphor of writing as drawing, where the would be artist has to learn to perceive the world in a new way and pay attention to its aspects that will contribute to a visually communicative representation. This is reminiscent of the way in which translator must build up a reservoir of parallelisms between the two languages.
### Writing as a physical activity
Writing is without question a literal physical activity. It requires not just mental but also physical exertion. Handwriting or typing while seated or standing, require physical coordination as well as a certain degree of stamina. Even dictation has a physical component. But writing is also reminiscent of physical activity in other ways. It takes place over time in a physical space, it requires tools and equipment. It also requires focus and endurance.
Each of these elements of the writing process place demands on the working memory to navigate successfully. At the moment of writing, the novice writer may struggle with being able to write in large enough chunks because they can only ever operationalise small chunks of writing due to the working memory being filled with the process of mechanics of writing. They are writing in words rather than sentences or paragraphs and the idea of generating coherent ideas through writing completely eludes them.
This is not dissimilar to novice runners who can only ever focus on the next minute or two of running in terms of planning their effort. Their run is articulated into much smaller segments than that of an expert runner. This has led to the development of techniques such as the famous Couch to 5K (C25K) which can transform a non-runner into a competent runner capable of running five kilometers in between 30 and 45 minutes. The process takes about 8-12 weeks and requires and begins with runs of 90 seconds, slowly building up to larger chunks.
This can serve as a model for the development of writing in ever increasing units. Going from phrases to sentences and paragraphs and ultimately to entire essays. We need to start with the acknowledgement that for the novice writer, the essay looms as much as the five-kilometer distance does for the non-runner. While the articulation of writing is in may ways more complex than that of running, the novice writer typically does not start without any linguistic background. It is not therefore inconceivable that a period similar to that of C25K could help a reluctant writer achieve greater fluency and stamina even while many aspects of writing expertise remain to be addressed through further practice.
Of course, another aspect of practice for physical activity is in person coaching where the coach gives feedback in real time. This seems much less applicable but at least one such framework exists:
> During one of these “writing with the teacher present” classes, a student said that these classes were more like athletic practice than class. We were practicing while the coach was around to break steps down into smaller and smaller elements and to help us learn the skills “in real time.”
>
More below.
### Writing as a musical performance
The act of writing is both analogous and disanalogous to music. The disanalogy is clear. Music performance is linear and its success depends on it being performed without technical flaws and with appropriate expressiveness without interruption. Writing, on the other hand, is circular requiring a number of recursive steps at every stage. Writing, rewriting, editing and reediting are commonly recognised as crucial elements of the writing process.
However, this is to overlook the fact, that a certain level of fluency is required in writing. The competent writer will indeed spend a significant amount of time redrafting, however, what matters is at which level of articulation the drafts and redrafts take place. When we observe the extremely dysfluent writer, for instance, young writers with dyslexia [ref], we see that the lack of fluency in constructing larger chunks prevents them from expressing their intentions. Writing then becomes an exercise in frutration.
The skills at all levels of articulation required for musical performance are analogous to those necessary for the composition of a viable draft, that can then be subject to rewriting and editing. Many elite musical performers have described the process of preparation for the performance of a new difficult piece. And their aim is universally to identify repeated patterns organised in large chunks that enable them to "think" ahead or "reason" about the piece, recover from stumbles and focus on expressiveness over the technical aspects.
However, to achieve this level of expressive fluency, the musical performer has to spend a significant amount of time on focused repetition of patterns at lower levels of articulation. Practicing scales and arpeggios to "get a feel" for a particular key or chord progression on their instrument.
Luckily, the amount of focused repetition is probably significantly lower for the novice writer because of the pre-existing mental representations that can be developed further. However, no empirical data on the difference exists.
Unlike musical performers, who, by this stage, have been pre-selected for their aptitude, almost anybody is expected to be able to write. It is therefore important to think about other sources of continued dysfluencies despite focused repetition These could be as simple as lack of typing skills or as complex as dyslexia. However, the writer is much freer in their mode of expression and free to choose dictation or handwriting as appropriate.
## Writing as a skill subject to multiple articulation
Writing is a skill. And any skill can be improved. Simply doing more of it will help. However, there is a point after which mere repetition does not help. In fact, many skills tend to atrophy and may even slightly decrease with pure repetition without any goal for improvement. [ref Medical diagnosticians]
Skills are not unitary monadic entities. They are complex, multifaceted, task and context-embedded and multiply articulated. It is this multiple articulation that will serve as a departure point here for integrating deliberate practice into the writing process. The performance of any task is happening at multiple levels of articulation. The notion of articulation comes from the linguistic concept of dual articulation of language. While we are trying to articulate ideas when we speak, we also have to articulate the sounds that make up the words we are using. And we further have to shape the words into the right forms and the sentences into the right sequences. Which is also a form articulation. But speech would be impossible if we had to pay conscious attention to every aspect of its production. And that's why when we say we are trying to articulate an idea, we do not mean any of the mechanical components of producing language.
The same notion of articulation applies to any skill, however. A runner does not have to nor can she pay attention to every aspect of her motion. She is trying to achieve a task distance, speed or merely exercise and articulates the completion of the task through running. But she does not articulate the run. A typist may have the task of speed, accuracy or simply transmission of knowledge. She will not focus on every aspect of the task.
Even more complex skills such as driving or even medical diagnostics are subject to this multiple articulation. In order to achieve, express or articulate the task a driver or diagnostician must perform a myriad of other actions which are often further articulated. Yet, paying heed to all or any one of them would simply overwhelm the capacity of their working memory and preclude them from achieving the main goal. [cf. Miller and magical number 7]
The notion of multiple articulation applies even more directly to the process of writing. The writer's main goal is not to just write words down. It is to articulate ideas in such a way that will faithfully represent the writer's ideas and that will result in an understanding by the reader. Create images in the reader's mind [cf. Pinker]. But in order to achieve that ultimate articulation, multiple other articulations must happen. The writer must adopt a certain physical posture and perform movements with their fingers. She must choose, shape, and arrange words. Those words require spelling. The choice of words and their arrangement will be subject to genre, style and register. It is only by being able to articulate all of these that the writer can achieve her task. That of articulating her ideas.
---
> Section 19 of 21 · Reviews of Writing Programs · id `reviews-coaching` · [read in the reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=reviews-coaching)
# Reviews of writing coaching programmes
How can we reconceptualise writing instruction from the perspective of deliberate practice and multiple articulation? The good news is that many if not most writing programmes already include components that could be considered deliberate practice. What they appear to lack is a focus at building up larger mental representations at multiple levels of articulation.
There are very few academic writing programmes that take a structured approach to the development of writing skills. In this section, I will briefly consider the Process approach which has been gaining popularity and has generated some research evidence [ref] . I will then compare two structured approaches to coaching writing and will offer a suggestion for a possible programme based on insights from all three working towards the idea of building up larger mental representations. Unfortunately, this section will of necessity be speculative since there is little evidence base to draw on.
### Process
The most common approach to teaching writing is Process [ref Coffin et al 2013]. The focus on the process of writing is consonant with deliberate practice. However, there is no coherent programme of study associated with Process. It appears to consist of its main philosophy and an eclectic mix of instructional activities. Many of these activities would form a core part of any instructional programme but there is no sense of progression across levels of articulation. It is not surprising that a meta analysis [ref] showed only modest improvements overall and no improvement for struggling writers.
The one crucial element of the Process approach is it emphasis on early, actionable feedback. Feedback both by instructors and peers is essential for the development of writing skills. Here the process literature and wealth of practical knowledge provides an invaluable resource to anybody wanting to enhance their deliberate practice with more relevant feedback.
In short, it is without doubt that any deliberate practice schema will include a significant number of techniques from the process approach but these would need to be structured around an individualised course of progression as the developing writers continue to build up chunks of increasing size across multiple levels of articulation.
### Writing process reingineering - Basboll
The cumulative and habit based approach promoted by the writing coach Thomas Basbol is an eight-week programme that focuses on building writing habits but also on practicing the form of the paragraph built around a topic sentence.
The writer is advised to schedule a block of time (30 minutes) and commit to write and edit one paragraph during that time. To facilitate this, the writer should construct a topic sentence the evening before.
For Basboll the paragraph is a foundational unit of academic writing and through this process, it is possible for writers to accumulate enough writing to become productive.
The writing process reingineering assumes that all other writing skills are available and the writer has requisite fluency in writing academic language and writing in general. All that the programme offers is the development of stamina.
### Frameworks for Academic Writing - Poulter
[Book: Frameworks for Academic Writing (Poulter)](https://human.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Composition/Advanced_Composition/Book%3A_Frameworks_for_Academic_Writing_(Poulter))
Frameworks for academic writing is very much based around the idea of building up chunks or mental representations at the various level of articulation of the writing process. It outlines patterns at the level of phrase, clause and paragraphs, and it encourages trainee writers to apply them to their own writing through practice. It very much goes beyond the simple 'academic English' paradigm by focusing on larger constructs but at the same time not simply limiting itself to genre forms such as essay or general compositional structures like the paragraph or topic sentence. Each component of the written whole is presented through a series of prompts from which templates are constructed illustrated by an example of use.
> **The point that** [*insert author’s last name*] **seems to be making in this** [*insert type of selection*] **is** [*insert what you think the message or point is here*].
>
The words in bold provide the basic structure for the writing assignment while the parts in square brackets are expected to be replaced by the trainee writer's own words. It is important, that the amount of text the student is expected to write is on the order of words to sentences.
But what brings the Frameworks for Academic Writing even closer to the principles of deliberate practice is reframing the role of the writing teacher and the purpose of the writing sessions. The origin of the idea is described in the introduction:
> One breakthrough idea that emerged from listening to students was the request to have writing teachers present while drafting their papers. They wanted to do their drafting during class.
>
This practice allowed the role of the teacher being framed as that of a coach:
> During one of these “writing with the teacher present” classes, a student said that these classes were more like athletic practice than class. We were practicing while the coach was around to break steps down into smaller and smaller elements and to help us learn the skills “in real time.”
>
### POWER by Patricia Goodson
[*Becoming an Academic Writer: 50 Exercises for Paced, Productive, and Powerful Writing*](https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/becoming-an-academic-writer/book244337)
### How to write a sentence by Stanley Fish
Fish's book cannot be considered a programme for writing instruction but its advice is very much one of deliberate practice.
### BASE: Academic writing capabilities framework by Helen Sword
Focuses on writing advice by analysing multiple author interviews and questionnaires. Goes againt the singular you should advice by reframing it as you may... Possibly 'you may want to try'.
Introduces the BASE framework which could be useful outside - similar to engagement frameworks - also very much deliberate practice compatible. Behavioural, Artisanal, Social and Emotional.
Artisanal was the weakest section - not because of Sword but because of the poor quality of the self reflection by the subjects (cf. King).
Behavioural and Social sections are most useful - social - writing with others, for others and among others is a particularly useful distinction.
[Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write by Helen Sword](https://www.notion.so/Air-Light-Time-Space-How-Successful-Academics-Write-by-Helen-Sword-ea05f21fda034f709e8f05f6c79376ce?pvs=21)
---
> Section 20 of 21 · License · id `license` · [read in the reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=license)
# License
This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).
## You are free to:
* **Share** — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
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The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.
## Under the following terms:
* **Attribution** — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
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## Notices:
You do not have to comply with the license for elements of the material in the public domain or where your use is permitted by an applicable exception or limitation.
No warranties are given. The license may not give you all of the permissions necessary for your intended use. For example, other rights such as publicity, privacy, or moral rights may limit how you use the material.
---
> Section 21 of 21 · Reader Guide · id `reader-guide` · [read in the reader](https://deliberatepractice.dominiklukes.net/?book=deliberate-practice§ion=reader-guide)
# How to Use This Reader
This interactive reader is designed to help you not just consume content, but actively practice the skills of deliberate practice. It includes several tools to support your reading experience, available in the "Read Your Way" section of the sidebar.
## Read Your Way Tools
You can customize your reading experience using the tools in the sidebar.
- **Theme (Contrast):** Switch between light and dark mode. Use dark mode for reading in low light or to reduce eye strain.
- **Focus Mode:** Toggle full-screen mode to remove distractions and hide the sidebar. This helps you focus entirely on the text. (Shortcut: `F`)
- **Ruler:** Display a reading ruler to help focus on specific lines of text, useful for tracking your place. Use the Up/Down arrow keys to move the ruler and number keys 1-4 to resize it. (Shortcut: `R`)
- **Listen (Read Aloud):** Have the guide read to you using text-to-speech. This is great for auditory learners or for reviewing content while doing other tasks. (Shortcut: `A` to play/pause)
- **Coach:** Open the AI Coach chat to ask questions about the content, get clarification, or discuss how to apply the principles to your specific situation.
- **Notes:** View and manage your highlights and reflections. You can highlight any text by selecting it, and then add notes to your highlights. (Shortcut: `H` to highlight selected text)
- **Keys:** View a list of all keyboard shortcuts available in the app to navigate and use tools faster. (Shortcut: `Shift + ?`)
- **eBook:** Download the entire guide as an EPUB file so you can read it on your Kindle, iPad, or other e-reader device.
## Navigation
- **Sidebar:** Use the sidebar on the left to navigate between chapters and sections.
- **Previous/Next:** Use the buttons at the bottom of each section to move sequentially through the guide.
- **Headings:** Use the **J** (next) and **K** (previous) keys to quickly jump between headings within a section.
- **Table of Contents:** On larger screens, a table of contents appears on the right side to help you jump to specific parts of the current section.
## Making the Most of Your Practice
Remember, this guide is about *deliberate practice*. Don't just read passively.
1. **Highlight** key concepts that resonate with you.
2. **Write reflections** at the end of sections to consolidate your learning.
3. **Use the Coach** to test your understanding.
4. **Practice** the techniques described (like chunking or speed variation) as you read.