Four Ways How Reading Makes You a Better Writer

Many athletes agree that competing with someone more skilled can be very useful because it motivates you to improve your own skills. In the same way, reading examples of good writing can help you understand what areas you need to improve. Besides, you can see what approaches are effective and use them in your work.

No matter what skill you want to master, you should know what you’re doing, and writing is no exception. Although the connection between reading and writing is rather obvious, many people still forget how important reading is for developing strong writing skills. People who love to read books can learn a lot from them and use these examples to improve their own writing.

Of course, not all writers write novels. For example, there are technical writers, bloggers, copywriters, journalists, and many other professionals who need good writing skills. Classical literature may not help you if you want to write for a tech blog, but it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t read. The main thing is to choose reading materials that can actually be useful for you. You can always read articles related to your niche or other textual materials similar to what you’re going to write. It’s especially important for students. Sometimes students have a lot of writing work or different disciplines. The professionals of law-essay-profy.com underline the quality of literature and sources.

Many athletes agree that competing with someone more skilled can be very useful because it motivates you to improve your own skills. In the same way, reading examples of good writing can help you understand what areas you need to improve. Besides, you can see what approaches are effective and use them in your work. Here are the four main reasons why reading can make you a better writer.

Reading can improve your vocabulary

First of all, reading can improve your vocabulary. In fact, reading is probably the only way one can learn new words. If your writing suffers from repetition or if you realize that you often try to describe your thoughts more precisely but don’t know how to do it, the chances are that your vocabulary needs some improvement.

The best solution is to read materials related to your subject or niche and to write down words that look interesting to you. If you want to better understand the meaning of some new words, look them up and write down their meaning. Check out definitions, grammar, and the way these words are used in sentences.

Another good practice is called close reading. Close reading is a continuous process of reading and writing. Combining these two activities in a loop is a great exercise for your brain. This way, you can use new words immediately, quickly memorizing them. The main thing about expanding your vocabulary through reading is not to fixate on results and to maintain the learning process as a habit.

Skip sections

I’m one of those people who feels bad if I miss anything (sometimes known as ‘fear of missing out‘). When it comes to reading, I definitely feel this. If something further ahead catches my eye, I can’t keep reading until I go back and catch up on the parts I missed.

I’ve actually realized recently that there is a kind of freedom in giving up that feeling of needing to see everything. Sometimes, it’s okay to skip parts. Especially if they’re not relevant to you. Readers on the web skim for a reason. In fact it has almost become our default way of reading, as this eye-tracking study shows:

When we’re reading on the web, we’ll often find handy stuff to help us do this, like subheadings or bold text. These can help us skim through and get the gist of an article quickly, so we can decide whether to go back and reread the parts we skipped.

A short bonus regarding long reads: in case of doubt, skip to the conclusion. If it’s worthy of understanding how the author got there, read it all. If not, congratulations. You just avoided wasting time.

One of the benefits of skipping over sections is that you’re not overloading your brain with irrelevant information, so the info that is going in can be processed more easily. Hopefully, this method can help us to remember more of what we read!

All the information we have available only increases our stress levels and diminishes available time. We consume much more than we create, we read much more than we think, and it should be the other way around. We have to make sure we consume the things that truly matter to us, but only so that we have time to create something that matters to someone else. – Roberto Estreitinho

Quit altogether

The older I get, the more I’m becoming a fan of quitting. Not for the sake of it, of course, but when continuing on doesn’t have enough (or any) benefits, sometimes pulling out is the best option.

One of the results of this self-examination — for that is what the writing of this book amounts to — is the confirmed belief that one should read less and less, not more and more…. I have not read nearly as much as the scholar, the bookworm, or even the ‘well-educated’ man — yet I have undoubtedly read a hundred times more than I should have read for my own good. Only one out of five in America, it is said, are readers of ‘books.’ But even this small number read far too much. Scarcely any one lives wisely or fully.

To speak without shame about books we haven’t read, we would thus do well to free ourselves of the oppressive image of cultural literacy without gaps, as transmitted and imposed by family and school, for we can strive toward this image for a lifetime without ever managing to coincide with it.

How Reading Makes You a Better Writer

One can’t complete a course or graduate from a university with a “bestselling writer” diploma. And one can’t become a good writer by learning all grammar rules and several writing techniques by heart. Literacy matters, but it doesn’t make you a writer per se .

Can you imagine a musician not listening to music? The same is true for writing. Writers work for readers, and no grammar rules or schemes can help you understand people if you don’t read.

Faulkner wasn’t alone in such an approach. Ray Bradbury said that he “spent three days a week” in a public library for ten years, and it was “better than college.” He called a library his alma mater and believed it could give “a complete education for no money.”

We know that Bradbury came from a modest family and didn’t have a chance to graduate from university. And yet, thousands of books he read helped him become “the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream.” ( The New York Times )

Thus, our writers at Bid4Papers are all bookworms; otherwise, they won’t be able to deliver academic papers of high quality when you ask to “ write my essay .” They read and research tons of material to outline and write the best essays for you.

How to Read More to Write Better

It’s not enough to merely read, even if you absorb hundreds of books. All those challenges a la “I’ll read 100 books this year” are bulls**t if you don’t understand and can’t analyze what you read.

Here they go:

• Identify a genre.
• Examine the language and writing style of the book. Try to analyze why it works or doesn’t work.
• Consider a structure: linear, random, or pyramidic. What format tricks does a writer use to tell this story?
• Identify the topic and tone of the book.
• Examine sentences. How does the author write? Are sentences long? Is the language simple or complex?
• Consider writing techniques an author uses. Do they work well?
• Watch your response to a story. Does it make you sit up and take notice? Or, is it predictable? Try to understand why it’s so.
• Read and compare two different books. What does make them interesting? What did the authors do to achieve that?
• Don’t hesitate to read writings that you wouldn’t ordinarily read.
• Make notes for everything that strikes you in the book and what makes you give up this story. Try to come up with the reason for such a reaction.

Enjoy what you read. After all, reading is not about pure analyzing and learning but joy as well. If a story is boring, don’t force yourself to read it. And if you don’t understand what happens in a story because you’re overanalyzing it, don’t give up the pleasure of reading for bare book reviews. If you read for fun, you’ll learn something anyway.

Bonus!

How Reading Makes You a Better Student

No matter how hard you try, you can’t escape reading when a student. And if you continue considering War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy the worst reading nightmare ever, we have bad news for you:

Plenty of research and studies prove: reading has a positive impact on student minds. The more you read in school, the better cognitive skills you get. Also, reading helps kids with self-identification and expanding a worldview.

“Those with the poorest reading skills and the greatest risk of social exclusion were least likely at 16 to have parents who went to their school to discuss their progress. They were most likely to leave school at 16 and feel that school is a waste of time. At 30, they were most likely to be unemployed and feel that ‘whatever I do has no real effect on what happens in my life.’” ( Source )

Source:

https://www.bookishelf.com/four-ways-how-reading-makes-you-a-better-writer/?amp
https://buffer.com/resources/5-ways-to-be-a-better-reader-and-improve-your-writing-in-the-process/
https://bid4papers.com/blog/read-more-write-better/