There are many things you can do to improve your writing skills. From developing a writing schedule to practicing with creative writing prompts or taking classes online, every writer has room for improvement and there are plenty of helpful resources available. One thing that many writers overlook that can help refine and boost skills is to become an avid reader.
Yes, all writers should be avid readers. You might read that and initially think that reading and writing are two separate issues and one does not affect the other. However, there are several reasons why people who are serious about wanting to improve their writing skills should read as much and as often as they can.
Reading a variety of topics and styles increases knowledge
Think of this: The more you know, the more topics you have available to write about. In saying that writers should be avid readers, it’s not referring only to reading fiction. Reading is a key to learning and to gaining new knowledge. Reading is the easiest and swiftest way to learn new things. The more you read, the more you’ll know. The more you know, the more things you have available in your mind to write about.
When you read a lot, you learn to catch other writers’ errors
If you’re an avid reader, you’ve likely come across content that made you pause because it was grammatically incorrect or misspelled or had a punctuation error. Learning to spot incorrect writing helps you become a better writer. It’s similar to investigators who are taught how to catch counterfeiters. They refine their skills at spotting counterfeit money by studying authentic money. They learn what real money looks like in such fine detail, it allows them to immediately spot errors or imperfections in counterfeit money.
The more you read, the more adept you become at identifying skillful writing when you see it. You learn to spot mistakes or poor quality. In doing so, you can learn to refine your writing skills.
Being an avid reader can help you expand your vocabulary
No writer ever wants his or her work to be redundant. Thinking of new ways to say things can be challenging. Expanding your vocabulary is always a good idea because it produces “fresh content” in your mind, meaning new words that you pull from to incorporate into your writing. The best way to improve your vocabulary is to read, especially to read at a challenging level – for instance a genre you’re not used to or a scholarly article.
When you come across words you don’t know, pause and learn their definitions. You might even want to compile a list of all the words you learn in a notebook. As you fill its pages, it becomes a sort of working thesaurus.
Having a reader’s perspective can help improve your writing
When you’re an avid reader, you develop clear preferences for style, tone, sentence structure and more. Keep these things in mind when you’re writing. You might say that reading can help place you “in the mind of a reader,” which, in turn, can help you develop your writing skills because you’ll know what readers want.
And remember: There isn’t any way that being an avid reader can impede your writing. So why not read as much and as often as you can?
