Want More People to Read What You Write? Tell Better Stories.

Tips to help transform your writing.

“Just practice!”

How many times have you heard that from a teacher when you just aren’t understanding how to factor different polynomials or deduce the theme of a novel?

Once upon a time, I struggled with elementary school math. I couldn’t grasp the concept of negative numbers. How could anything less than zero exist? My mind was blown. According to my cousin, who was trying to do my parents a favour by helping me with math, I just needed to practice.

Great advice.

After a lot of trial-and-error, I eventually caught on and grew to love math. It took months of torturing, I mean teaching myself to understand the concepts, but that’s a story for another time.

Today is all about reading to improve writing skills.

Yes, consistent practice leads to improvement, so what my cousin told me was partially true, but there’s more to it than just writing and writing until you one day wake up as the next Virginia Woolf.

One secret to spice up your writing doesn’t involve writing at all. Actually, it involves reading.

What we read influences what we think and what we learn, and thus how we behave. Reading makes us better writers: fiction or essays. Reading allows us to gain knowledge and learn new ways of seeing the world around us. Reading enhances our…