I think that one of the most helpful practices to do is to restate the important arguments that you read in their fullest form possible. People often think that, if you don’t have anything “original” to write, you should just stick to writing fragmentary notes in a journal, which tend to remind you of the arguments but be incoherent to other people. But I disagree. If I am reading what I think is an important, elegant, and convincing argument, I will try to restate the entire thing in the clearest and most concise way possible but in my writing style. In fact, If I can’t think of a better way to write a part of it, I literally just copy what they wrote. It doesn’t matter to me whether it would seem to other people that I am just copying or “parroting” what they wrote. My only standard is whether or not the way that I am writing it is the best way that I can think of.
I think that the reason why people tend to hold that opinion is because of the copyright system. With the system in existence, to write something that people are going to pay attention to, you have to write it so it is original enough that it doesn’t get struck down by the copyright system. Which makes people tend to forget that it of course is possible to make a piece of writing better by just slightly tweaking it instead of rewriting the entire thing, synthesizing the works of many different people so the contribution of any of those people is dissipated enough to allow you to evade the arm of the copyright system, or making the majority of it original.
When I was in middle school and high school, I found it bizarre and ridiculous that, when they assigned us papers to do, the teachers always wanted us to “change the wording” of information that we found but then cite it. Why should we change the wording? What if the way that I found it is the best way of wording that I can think of? It seemed like “cheating”, like we were changing the wording just to look like we were being more “original” than we really were. Why not just be honest? I felt ridiculous sitting there trying to figure out how to state it differently when I usually couldn’t think of a better way to do it. When you’re not a good writer having developed your own style, however the person worded what you found feels inescapable, like it is the best way to write it.
With the destruction of the copyright system, I think that this bias will disintegrate, I think that people will stop identifying writing and the ideas of the writing so strongly with an individual of a group of individuals and ideas will become more “autonomous”. Large numbers of people will start colloborating on projects with no central plan, just as a spontaneous, undesigned order, tweaking the writing of each other to create the final product. People will feel okay about “parroting” most of something and changing only the content of one example or the clarity of one paragraph. People will stop feeling like messing, for example, with the wording of Murray Rothbard, is blasphamy, and start thinking of it as a good exercise and maybe even a way to improve what he wrote. In fact, we are already seeing things like that happening. The open source movement, including, most importantly, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Wikipedia, and others, are heading people in that direction and putting stress on the copyright system.
(By the way, to see a good example of that reaction of “blasphamy”, check out this link where a guy does a “techno remix” of the 5th symphony of Beethoven only to get buried under tons of pages of flaming of people saying, for example, “WHY THE FUCK WOULD SOMEBODY REMIX OR EVEN TRY TOUCHING A MASTER PIECE LIKE THIS…AND TRY TO MASKE IT BETTER???”, “Beethoven would be rolling in his grave”, and “Why would someone want to take this masterpiece and completely ruin it?”.)