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 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.