How reading relates to writing (Edward Chen)

Reading and writing are inseparable. Reading is an important component for people to improve their writing skill. The more people read, the more improvement of writing they will achieve. For example, in childhood, parents always give their kids some books which include illustrations to read before the kids possess writing skills. Since these children read the books and appreciate the meanings of the words, they have the ability to write sentences little by little. Nonetheless, the improvement for the children in this stage is limited, because the materials they use are simple. However, when the children start going to schools, writing skills for the children are surprisingly boosted. The reason for the great improvement is because they have to read a lot of academic essays or journals. Therefore, to improve the writing skill whereby reading ”academic” essays or journals is an effective and efficient way.

Reading academic essays can help people writing in different ways. First of all, we can absorb various writing styles from reading different author’s articles. In America, some professors like to grade students based on their improvements. If a student writes her/his essays with the same writing style, s/he might not be able to obtain a good grade despite the student is good at using words. However, if another student, who is capable of writing in varied styles, uses simple words in the essays. This student will receive a superior grade than the student who always writes in the same style. Furthermore, reading academic essays also helps writers to build up their vocabularies. When students are assigned to write an academic essay, the vocabularies they are going to use in the essay has to be more specific. For instance, “good” and “bad” are too general, writers need to find other words which more precisely describe how good or bad the situation is. The last advantage of reading academic essays is to prevent colloquial language. This advantage somehow relates to the last perspective. Students will need to look up some more vocabularies while they are reading an academic essay, because academic essays compose of a bunch of words with precise meanings, and these words might not be spoken in people’s daily life, so they will feel unfamiliar with the words.

Reading really brings me to the next level of writing. When I was in the English Second Language program, one of the assignments was to use the new vocabularies I found from the reading materials to make an essay. I had to write an essay which consisted of these words so I utterly comprehended the meanings of these new words. If I could properly use these vocabularies in my essays, it meant I fully understood these vocabularies. This method really expedited my understanding of the words and made my essays more fluent.

In addition, I realized how reading could connect to writing when I was assigned to do a research paper. A research paper means I have to search for a lot of information and exploit the data into a paper. At the beginning, I merely had some brief ideas; hence, I went online to find some academic articles and news which supported and related to my topic. After I read these articles, I not only obtained some quotations, but also perceived how to start my research paper. Reading these articles helped me to combine my ideas, and also provided me some positive and negative perspectives about my topic. Additionally, it also provided me some ideas that I didn’t even think of. Counting on these reading materials, I received a good grade for my research paper. If I hadn’t read these articles, I would not have improved this much.

However, to read academic essays has some degree of disadvantages as well. If students peruse too many academic readings, it might make their daily speech sound too formal. Usually people speak in a causal way in their daily life, and causal speech is easier to be appreciated. Therefore, it is a bit queer to talk to friends or people around you in a formal way. Moreover, if writers are unable to digest the writing styles they capture from perusing different authors’ masterpieces and transfer authors’ styles into their own style; they maybe lose their own writing styles. Creativity is significantly important for college students when they are going to do a writing assignment. As a result, reading will not utterly help you on writing if you don’t have sufficient ability to digest it.

In sum, reading really has a strong connection with writing. People who want to be good writers, it will be essential for them to read a lot in order to improve their writing skill and knowledge. In my case, I really don’t like to read books or academic essays, I feel extremely bored when I read these materials. However, I realized how reading could expedite my writing improvement every time when I got my writing assignments back from professor. For now, even though I still dislike reading some academic materials, I will force myself to do it, because I found out that if I want to receive a good grade on writing or be an excellent writer, reading is something that is inevitable.