How can a writing student be more like an art student?

I saw a post today with some advice from Chip Scanlon's weekly e-newsletter, arguing for more use of imitation to learn to be a better writer.

He is not talking about plagiarism, but about finding great models that can help us develop our own writing "voices" by analyzing some successful voices. 

Here are some relevant grafs from Scanlon:

This practice horrifies some respected writers and teachers; write your own darn stories, they say. But if we were visual artists, would anyone look askance at visiting a museum to try and copy the paintings to see how accomplished artists used color and shadow and contrast?

I’m not talking about plagiarism. Rather, modeling is copying stories to gain a more intimate understanding of the variety of decisions that writers make to organize material, select language, and shape sentences.

Now’s a good time for my one caveat about modeling lessons: Always copy the writer’s byline at the top of the story in case you get deluded and confuse someone else’s writing with your own.

Properly credited, I start typing.

Scanlon types annotations after particularly good sentences, digging into technique, questioning rhetoric, noting tactics, etc. I must admit that I have not used the idea of copying out key paragraphs or dialog or leads from great writing in my own classroom, but I have used the modeling idea when teaching design. 

In the high school journalism lab, I would give each student learning Adobe InDesign a letter-size magazine page -- from Time magazine, for instance -- and the assignment was to copy the page on the computer screen. Copy the grid. Copy where the art goes. Copy the size of the type (best approximation). Copy the lines (strokes) and boxes. Copy the leading. 

THAT idea came from reading about art students who sit in museums painstakingly trying to copy the work of past masters, right down to the brush strokes, as a way to understand how experts produce their art. 

When I was a kid, I experimented with dozens of baseball batting stances, hoping for one that would feel comfortable and powerful and under control. I copied my favorites, like Ernie Banks and Mickey Mantle. I figured that if I swung the bat like a pro, I had a better chance of being a good hitter. It turned out that eyesight and reflexes and wrist strength and hip rotation and bat length and weight were all important factors... maybe more important than how I looked in the batter's box. But at least I had somewhere to start.

Unless you want to be an art forger, settling for perfectly copying master works is not a good long-term plan, and copying down lines from other writers is certainly not a good strategy when it's time to write that report or news story. 

But trying to reproduce great work reveals some of the HOW in writing or painting or designing or hitting a baseball.

It turns out that some very old education models, and copying qualifies, were based on solid thinking. 

If I were dropped back into a high school journalism classroom, some copying of favorite grafs would become part of my teaching strategy.