Reading is a powerful tool for improving your ability to write in English, or any other language. But that should not be a surprise because most of our fluency – our ability to read, write, speak, and listen – comes from reading and listening to understandable English.
Stories of two writers
When I started working with Xurxo, one of my tutoring students, I was surprised by how well he wrote. When I asked him where he learned to write like that, he said, “By reading essays from the New York Times.”
Brian Clark is a well-known and very successful blogger. Last year he wrote:
“You may find it amusing to know that I … have never learned the formal rules of grammar. I learned how to write by reading obsessively (all the time) at an early age, but when it came time to learn the “rules,” I tuned out. If you show me a bad sentence, I can fix it, but if I need to know the technical reason why it was wrong in the first place, I go ask my wife.”
Xurxo and Brian are right. Most of our ability to write comes from reading.
I ask all my tutoring students to read regularly. And if they want to be able to do a certain kind of writing, I encourage them to read the kind of writing they want to do.
I encourage them to “read like a writer,” an idea that comes from Frank Smith’s book Reading FAQ. When you read like a writer, you identify with the writer (think with him/her) and pay attention to how he/she organizes and expresses his/her ideas.
Writers to read
Here are a few places you can find columns, or essays, by popular American writers who regularly write for major newspapers or magazines:
- Writers from Newsweek, a weekly news magazine.
- Writers from The New York Times, a leading American newspaper. Look in the box below the word “Opinion.”
- creators.com has a long list of writers who contribute to a variety of newspapers and magazines in the U.S. If you want some help, here is a list of politically and socially conservative writers and a list of politically and socially liberal writers.
Warren Ediger
warren [at] successfulenglish [dot] com
