This Is Why the Best Writers Are the Most Avid Readers
All you need to know about how contributory this hobby is in developing your writing skills
Whether you’re interested or compelled to put words on paper, you might be facing a lack of improvement in your writing skills, even though you practice enough and write as often as you can. The bad news is that not only is it a common problem, but one of the main reasons why many give up.
However, to find an answer to your problem, you need to answer this first: when was the last time you read a book or an interesting magazine article?
If your answer is ‘one week ago’ or even before that, there lies your problem.
To many, reading is a hobby, but to many of you, it’s a chore. You fail to get pleasure from it, which is why you never work it into their schedule. Yet, this dull pastime is what you need to do more frequently and widely to learn how to write more accurate, interesting, and inspiring pieces.
Here are the reasons why reading is the best writing teacher.
It expands your knowledge
Everything you read fills your brain with new bits of information, and you never know when it might come in handy. The more knowledge you have, the more ideas come to your mind when writing, lack of which is the number one stumbling block for writers. Reading makes you an informed writer, and your knowledge-laden prose makes your readers think their time was well-spent after reading your pieces.
It improves your vocabulary
The more you read, the more words you gain exposure to, and they’ll inevitably make their way into your everyday vocabulary. Being articulate and verbally rich is what every great writer has to be. Words are the tools of thought, and the more of them you have under your belt, the more likely you are to get your point across without any hints of digression.
You could argue that you can buy many vocabulary books on the market and learn words directly, but research has shown that words are best assimilated when seen in action. This is more the case especially if you’re a non-native English speaker because gaining exposure to words used in context will pave the way for them to move into your active memory.
It improves your grammar
This one goes hand-in-hand with vocabulary because studying grammar is useless as long as you aren’t exposed to what you’ve studied in works of professional authors. More importantly, you will learn which structures are used in writing and which aren’t so that, by avoiding them, you would write more naturally in addition to writing more accurately.
It makes your writing more coherent
Exposure to published, well-written work has a noted effect on one’s writing, as observing the fluidity, and writing styles of other authors will invariably influence your work. No matter how much you learn about creating cohesive and coherent pieces of writing, you will write organized but mechanical pieces unless you learn how to craft prose by reading the works of others.
It makes you a better communicator
Reading helps us make connections to our own experiences and emotions so reading makes you a better writer and a better communicator. Despite that, even though we come up with the ideas to write about, it’s not that easy to put them into words. By reading widely, you gain insight into how words come together to deliver a message. You can even come across influential sentences that stay in your mind as a tool or frame to replace their words with your own ones and deliver new messages with ease.
In a nutshell, reading and writing are inseparable. The better writers tend to be exceptional readers, and better readers can produce exceptional writing. A writer who doesn’t read is like a musician who doesn’t listen to music or a filmmaker who doesn’t watch films. It is demoralizingly hard to do good work without experiencing the good work that has been done before.
A well-read writer has better verbal skills, discerns the nuances of language, and distinguishes between poor and quality writing, so read more, read widely, and learn from other people who do what you are aiming at with the facility and the skill level you would love to cultivate.
