Reading That Makes You a Pro Writer

by Masa

Let's face it. Being good at writing has so much to gain. Better grade, better job, better relationship. They turn the life of misery into a forever easy mode.

But how to write well is never been taught. Your school teachers only tell you how terrible your writing is with red inks all over the paper. That's the only way they can express the forecast of your doomed writing life.

Worry no more. There has been a recent scientific finding in how an excellent writer reads. There's a strong correlation between the types of content you read and how well you can write. That's a much better advice than King's stoic advice of writing 2000 words a day.

Go on. It's time to discover how your writing can be improved with the choice of reading you make.

How Will Better Writing Help You?

1. Better Grades

Many assignments involve writing at schools. That's especially true if you're enrolled in humanity majors. Not only being able to write better helps you get a better grade, but it lets you complete the assignments faster. You will have more spare time doing other leisures. What about one more margarita with your friend?

2. Win Grants

Time to talk about money. Universities offer numeral grants you can apply for. But almost 100% of the time, you'll have to write why you are qualified for grants. You can say how motivated you are in studying, or how desperate you need the money. Either way, you will need to elaborate your ideas and thoughts in a compelling manner.

This doesn't stop at universities. If you want to start a restaurant or a small business, the government usually offers grants to get you started. That's especially true for young folks in 20s. I've also written one for my startup before. It's the legitimate money that helps get your business off the ground. Why not take the advantage.

3. Get Your Dream Job

As much as we hate to do, we have to apply jobs with a cover letter. LinkedIn lets you apply with a simple button sometimes, but those jobs have 100s of applicants. In order to differentiate yourself from other candidates, you will need to write - it's a powerful way to show how appealing you are as a potential employee.

People often mix up cover letter with the resume. The distinction made is resume is where you put down your skills, and cover letter is where you show your motivation. You'll be delivering a story of how your life plan would fit in with that potential company. On top of that, I can easily see employers filtering out candidates with poor writing skills in this step, as writing is one of the top skills companies ask for from business personals. That makes sense when most white collar jobs work with the communication.

4. Gain More Followers

Social media follower is the biggest currency today. Before we needed to bypass big guys like TV either by paying millions of dollars or simply begging. Now, you can reach thousands of people all by yourself. Taylor Swift, with her 89 million followers on Twitter, is easily said to be more influential than the president of the United States.

It doesn't matter if you want to be a famous celebrity or sell your new innovative products. You need to communicate ideas with people. Writing skill makes true your dream. More and more followers will want to stick around with you waiting for your next words.

One day, it was at night. I went to grab a Starbucks with my car. When I came back with a cup of coffee, I saw this big yellow parking ticket on the windshield. The sign was so obviously hidden because of the tree. So I went on to file a complaint. Unlike the popular Judge Judy show, all filing happened online very quietly. I had to write a long paragraph explaining my concern and the parked situation.

The hard part of this filing is you only get one chance. There's no back and forth interaction to clarify your intention. You have to write carefully once so it leaves no room for misunderstanding, all while persuading the unknown judge your complaint.

6. Relationship Success

Today, 1/3 of American married couple meets online. Break the ice used to be the situational cue in a bar to start chatting with a girl. Now, that's become synonymous to sending a text message. No facial exploration. No body language. There's just text. Needless to say, writing skills is all you've got.

It's no longer sufficient to just communicate your idea clearly or persuading the other person. It's about being romantic and flirtatious over the text. Life has never become writing heavy.

7. Less Interpersonal Conflict

Do you have an experience when you get a text from someone and it sounds so cold? In fact, text naturally comes off emotionless to the receiver. The best is to separate the transactional text and emotional warm text.

You might send a formal email to your boss with long complicated wordings, while inserting 5 emojis at the end of every sentence to your lover.

8. Future Novelist

Don't lie. I know you thought about writing a book once in your life. The good news to that wanderlust is that you never know. Harukami Murakami, now the million seller international novelist, has never written anything before the age 29 (15 Haruki Murakami Quotes On Writing). That simply indicates the massive amount of potentials everyone has internally regardless of their background experience. One day you may sit down and start writing to become the greatest novelist in the world.

9. Emotional Stability

Lincoln used to write a letter of extreme denunciation towards his subordinates and political opponents. But, he never actually sent it. People only discovered these letters after his death from the desk drawers. He used this method to calm his mind. This process of emotional control is called expressive writing today.

Another concept that's popular today is morningpage. It asks you to write 750 words every morning to express your feeling: concern about the new job, frustration for your boss, anxiety over performance review, etc. By writing your emotion down it helps calm your mind.

10. Life Becomes Enjoyable

Writing is inevitable in our lives. But many of us grow up feeling scared of writing, as if it's some kind of death sentence. You will be forever judged by imaginary heartless teachers. But writing in fact is a fun creative act for pro writers. Once you get over the scary thoughts, you will feel much confidence and will not show frowned face every time you hear the word "please write...".

Research Experimented with Boosting Writing Skill

This writing complexity experiment has been conducted at the MBA faculty of University of Florida in 2016. Their starting point was this. Universities are under more pressure than ever from the workforce to get students to improve their writings. That had been the most requested skillset from the fresh graduates. For the longest time, their response has been about giving more writing assignments and instructions. But researchers had different opinions. Yellowlees Douglas and Samantha Miller speculated, it may be actually the reading that has more impacts on your writing ability.

Experiments

They gathered 45 MBA students, and asked to copy and paste the exact second paragraph of the cover letter they were going to send it to the actual employers. As it was the first job post-graduate, their life career was at stake. Writing can never be more serious than this.

Then, they asked what type of content they read the most every week. Categories are: academic journals, literary fiction books, popular fiction books, non fiction books, news, magazines, and online media.

They tried to find a correlation between the reading and writing skills. To measure the writing skills, they used an algorithm called L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer. US uses that same mechanism to separate books into different grade levels appropriately for elementary and secondary schools.

Note

Examples of news: Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and USA Today.

Examples of magazines: Forbes, Fast Company, and The Economist.

Examples of online media: Buzzfeed, Twitter, and blogs.

Correlation Between Writing and Reading Material

They found a significant correlation between the types of reading and the average length of sentences in the participant groups. Here're the rankings:

  1. Academic Journal
  2. Nonfiction Books / Literary Fiction Books
  3. Popular Fiction Books
  4. Magazines / News / Online Blog

Academic journals are considered to be the hardest to read. The sentence is written in a very formal language with domain specific terminologies. On the other hand, news has a writing guideline in US, where they are recommended to write at the level of  5th grade education. No wonder it's ranked the last. The interpretation of this finding is clear. The harder the material you read, the more complex of language you can write in.

Interestingly, however, the amount of hours people spent reading had no effect on the level of complexity in their writings. It was all about how difficult the materials are - quality reading over quantity. Whether you read on Kindle, iPhones, or papers didn't matter either.

What Can You Do Today?

Depending on where you are, you want to switch your reading habit. If you always read news and online blogs, it's time to pick up a book. If you read books already, it's time to pick up an academic journal. The beauty of academic journal is you can find them free online (at least the abstract) just like online blog.

The only down side of academic journals is that the reading can be challenging with many graphs and equations, and you need a minimum level of expertise in that domain. If you aren't confident in any, I recommend starting from psychology papers. They are a lot more relevant and applicable to your daily life and more relatable to the anyone's experience. The best place to start is PsychologyToday, where PhD often writes the latest findings. You can follow their sources in the first few paragraphs to read into academic journals.

Academic journals are the frontier of science and keeping up with the newest knowledge will turn out to be a fun experience. At the same time, your writing is getting better. Two birds with one stone!