Reading Will Improve Your Writing, But How to Fit It In?
While I didn’t number it separately as one of the six science-backed ways reading makes your life better and longer in Read ‘Em & Reap, I did provide anecdotal evidence that another benefit of reading is that it improves your writing, in the form of quotes from people who should know:
“If you don’t have time to read,
you don’t have the time (or the tools)
to write. Simple as that.”
— Stephen King
“Read. Read. Read. … and see how they do it.
Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice
and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it.
Then write.”
— William Faulkner
Here are a few more:
“[T]he best way to learn to write is by reading.
Reading critically, noticing paragraphs that get the job done,
how your favorite writers use verbs, all the useful techniques.”
— Tony Hillerman“When you start reading in a certain way, that’s already
the beginning of your writing. You’re learning what you
admire and you’re learning to love other writers.
The love of other writers is an important first step.”
— Tess Gallagher“If you read good books, when you write, good books
will come out of you. Maybe it’s not quite that easy,
but if you want to learn something, go to the source. …
So just listen, read, and write.”
— Natalie Goldberg
The Science Agrees
And in case you’re not ready to take their word for it, the science also backs up this one.
A 2019 study reported that “reading has a positive impact on enhancing writing achievement” in school children and specifically “helps learners develop their writing experience by inspiring them, expanding their vocabulary, and improving their grammatical structure.”
A 2015 study examined how including reading tasks in writing instruction for students learning English as a foreign language affected their ability to write effectively. The researchers found that the writing skills of those who had included reading were “significantly improved.”
And a 2014 study found that a “reading-to-writing” model best explained the changes in scores in both skillsets, indicating that reading to improve your writing works! One interesting aspect was the findings were strongest at the word level. Which tells us, I think, that when you’re searching for that just right word to express your idea, it will help that you’ve read how a lot of other authors expressed theirs.
It’s also worth reminding that reading fiction for pleasure is just as important as all the nonfiction you’ll be reading to research the support for your ideas (if you’re writing a nonfiction book). As Yvonne has shown in her Proof Positive Storytelling (Narrative) Works for Nonfiction post, adding storytelling to your nonfiction work makes it far more readable, memorable, and persuasive.
Getting More Reading Into Your Life
Going back to that quote from Stephen King above, the most common excuse we hear for not reading books, or not reading fiction in particular, is lack of time. So I’m going to gift you the chapter from Read ‘Em & Reap, in which I offered a range of “life hacks” to remove that barrier for you.
The full chapter makes for a bit of a long blog post, so you may want to bookmark it and read it in sections. But overcoming whatever is keeping you from reading books is the goal and we’ve just covered why that’s worth the effort. Here’s the full chapter, with just a few edits and comments:
8
Adopt Your Own Reading Plan
“The more that you read,
the more things you will know.
The more that you learn,
the more places you’ll go.”
— Dr. Seuss
If you’ve read this far, I hope you’ve learned some new information about the benefits of reading. More importantly, I hope you’re eagerly forming your own ideas about how to incorporate reading more effectively into your daily life.
While I’m revealing my hopes for this book, I hope you’ll share what you’ve learned with friends and family. As my choice of the quote above hints, I hope our love of deep reading and printed books will continue across generations, starting them early – the younger, the better. If you’re “young” like me, help your kids, grandkids, maybe even great-grandkids acquire a healthy reading habit.
Why the younger, the better? Maryanne Wolf makes a potentially scary point about the print vs. digital issue, rooted in the evolution of our species.
“The act of learning to read added an entirely new circuit to our brains . . . learning to read deeply and well changed the very structure of that circuit’s connections, which rewired the brain, which transformed the nature of human thought.”
These deep reading circuits are not genetically wired into our brains. Not nearly enough time has passed for natural selection to achieve that. Humans reading long-form text has been widespread only since the invention of the printing press, combined with the growth of institutionalized education in the last 200 years or so. Thus, “The reality is that each new reader – that is, each child – must build a wholly new reading circuit.”
Her question for us about whether and how we will pass deep reading on to future generations and how our choices may impact their brains’ capacities for “sophisticated intellectual processes” might seem chilling:
“Will the time-consuming, cognitively demanding deep-reading processes atrophy or be gradually lost within a culture whose principal mediums advantage speed, immediacy, high levels of stimulation, multitasking, and large amounts of information?”
I don’t pretend to know whether deep reading circuits and the cognitive skills they support provide long-term survival advantages over the sort of speedy, “spasmodic” attention Wolf herself found in her reading experiment. Nor whether digital reading may lead to rewiring our brains with circuits that support new capabilities right out of science fiction.
But for now, my bet is on both. (I know, where have you heard that before!) Given our earlier discussion of brain plasticity, I see no reason why we can’t preserve our deep reading circuits while we build new ones to handle the digital reading tasks and habits that seem to be inherent in how we consume those media.
So, back to developing your reading plan. To prompt your thinking, you could read through the blog post, Read More: 27 Ways To Get Reading This Year [that pre-2019 article is no longer available online as of my search today]. But on the chance that a list of 27 tips might seem more like tedium than treat, I’ve distilled three based on that article, plus a bonus tip of my own.
3 Tips for adding more reading to your life
1. Read, routinely. Make reading a habit. If you’re fortunate, reading will become an addiction for you. Feed it. Combining several of the methods from the Read More article:
- Set aside daily times for reading. Say, 10 minutes first thing in the morning and 10 more at bedtime. Block these times out and treat them as vital to your well-being. According to the article, this alone will allow you to read about 15 books per year!
- Read all the time. Add to your “minimum daily requirement” by reading opportunistically. Use blocks of time you’d otherwise waste, like waiting in lines, sitting in reception rooms, parking outside your kids’ school, and so on. Make reading your default down-time filler.
- Keep your reading materials handy. Put books in your car, backpack, purse or jacket pocket. Keep several on your nightstand, one or more on side tables and counters in every room in your house and office. Add relevant magazines or printouts for reads you can finish in a few stray minutes.
I can attest to the combined value of these opportunistic reading habits. Yvonne almost always brings a book with her when we get into the car to go anywhere more than a few minutes away and spends most of the trip reading. If our errands include any stops where I’ll need to wait for her, I bring one of the books I’m reading and take full advantage!
2. Read, freely. Or at whatever price fits your budget. Start with local libraries. Remember those? When we moved the last time, I didn’t realize the value of having a public library in walking distance [back when we lived in Colorado]. After driving by it for months, I wandered in one day and got a card and got in the habit of checking out an armload of books every few weeks.
Plus, I gained access to an amazing range of online materials through the library website. [After we moved, we quickly located the nearest library, not walkable now, but a short drive away. We go together every couple of months.]
If you’re a student, you almost certainly have a wonderful physical library and online research and reading tools, as well. Of course, Google Books, Project Gutenberg, and others provide you with free access to public domain books.
More free or cheap sources: Bookmobiles, swap sites or groups, sharing with family and friends, used book stores, thrift shops with a book section, free ebooks, services like Kindle Unlimited and BookLender.com.
3. Read, deeply. And, read interactively. Many of the reading benefits we’ve learned about together flow from what cognitive scientists label deep reading – “slow, immersive, rich in sensory detail and emotional and moral complexity.” If you’re reading fiction, even moderately well-written, this kind of deep reading should happen automatically.
But for nonfiction, where you go for purposeful learning, deep reading may feel a bit more like work. It’s well worth the effort, though, as our tour of the brain-building and longevity benefits showed. And that’s where reading interactively comes in, from two directions.
First, interact with the text. This might include following your place with your finger or bookmark. You might read aloud to yourself or to another. The most important tool when I’m trying to learn something new or master a difficult topic is: Take notes. I have three different ways I do this, depending generally on how I think I might use the material later.
1. If I’m reading in preparation for near-term use, such as referring to a book in an upcoming presentation, I tend to place small Post-It notes on the edges of the pages next to the relevant text. Sometimes, I write notes on the part of the Post-It that sticks out. When I bend the book’s pages, the notes form a kind of quick index to the main points I want to share.
2. When I don’t have a specific use I’m preparing for, I tend to underline and write notes in the margins, directly highlighting passages and ideas I want to remember. These notes might express my agreement, surprise, questioning of a point, or some connection to other work I’ve read. 
They will often form the seed of a future blog post, webinar, or talk. I designed the page layout of this book to provide you with wide margins on the outside – so please, experiment with your own ways of capturing your ideas in real time.
3. Sometimes I’m reading multiple books, articles, and online materials in an effort to learn a broader subject – in my work on helping people find their next path, for example. This kind of reading looks a lot like a multi-year course of study.
By now, I’ve read dozens of books on career shifting, happiness, aging well, creativity, neuro-science, and learning – I even earned a U. Penn. specialization certificate comprising five courses in Positive Psychology, with multiple books to be read. For most of my reading on these topics, I’ve annotated more expansively in notebooks. As you can see in the photo, when I get to this level of learning intensity, I’ll often make notes in the margins of my notes!
Second, interact with others, about the text. Want a great way to make nonfiction reading more fun and less work? Tell others what you’re learning. Teach it, gifting the valuable ideas or information casually to your friends and family, or presenting more formally in person or in your own writing.
One of the best ways I’ve found to do this in a fun setting, I joined a book club back in Boulder, CO. Named “Business, Books, and Brews,” the monthly reading and discussion focuses on self-development and business-related books. Do a quick search on MeetUp.com and you’ll likely find a similar group in your area. If not, start one!
Bonus tip:
Subscribe, strategically
A couple of weeks after I started this project an email newsletter I subscribe to hit my inbox with that subject line you saw above, Read More: 27 Ways To Get Reading This Year [no longer available].
Pretty lucky, eh?
Actually, this happens for me on a regular basis. So often, in fact, that in my early 2000s blog posts [e.g., here and here], I labeled it “discovery-by-serendipity.”
The experience seems to flow naturally from subscribing to – and then actually reading – relevant blogs and newsletters. Relating then to my personal knowledge management (PKM) work, I began calling it “the planning-to-experience-serendipity side of PKM.” In our business blogging boot camps and speaking at conferences, I took to describing this benefit of my reading addiction as “putting my lap where useful information can fall into it.”
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the torrent of information spewing at us these days. It might seem that subscribing to have some of it intentionally aimed your way would only make it worse. But not if you’re strategic about it.
Instead of looking at your inbox as another firehose, I recommend viewing it as a valve that gives you control over the flow. Or a filter, where you can insert coarser or finer mesh to remove more or fewer “contaminants” from your mental environment. Or maybe like panning for gold, where you choose different gauge pans to control which information nuggets you’ll capture.
Start with a strategy. Strategy starts with deciding what resources you want to pull in. It should not be hard to locate a half dozen or so thought leaders in whatever field you’re working. That should be enough for their blogs or email newsletters to provide you with summaries, commentary on, and links to most of the latest issues, innovations, personalities, and trends affecting your work.
When I was starting out in legal knowledge management and information design work, I relied on a mix of generally relevant and precisely targeted blogs by law librarians and KM consultants to help me keep current and provide raw material for my own writing and commentary.
Keep it strategic. To keep your subscribing strategic, clean the filters now and then. As my work evolved (zigzagged?) through book publishing, into consulting work in blogging and social media, I cancelled most of the law and KM subscriptions, added print book industry blogs and newsletters, then shifted again toward digital publishing and online marketing resources. [Now, of course, I’m back to book publishing, but with a whole different mix weighted toward indie publishing.]
In addition to what you can discover in your email inbox, of course, social media continues to evolve as a potential filtering tool. For years, I found Twitter especially useful as an inbound information filter, by carefully following people for the same reasons I chose email subscriptions.
Using social media this way, however, requires paying more attention to choosing those you follow, while letting go of the usual focus on who – or should I say how many – are following you.
I confess that in past years I had drifted toward counting my followers a bit, as my social media marketing role in BlogPaws grew. Now that we’re back working on our own, I suspect the pendulum may swing back. [It has, since that was written more than five years ago!]
I [remain] cautious, though. We’ve all seen the recent controversies over social media companies manipulating their algorithms to inhibit the free flow of information. Or worse, the sophisticated ways malicious individuals and organizations have filled these channels with false and misleading information. Both should give us pause about treating social media as an information source. [For an excellent review of the problem and tips on how to take charge of keeping the social media you encounter reliable, grab our clients’ new book, Down the Rabbit Hole: Slowing the Spread of Misinformation and Propaganda on Social Media, by Lacey J. Faught and Adrienne Harvey.]
For now perhaps, strategic subscriptions pulled intentionally to your email inbox may remain the best method to experience your own discovery-by-serendipity moments.
[End of Chapter 8]
I hope these ideas help you build your own custom reading plan to reap the many benefits, not least of which will be becoming a better writer.
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