The Value of Reading Redux

A post I wrote five years ago for this blog called "The Value of Reading" highlights nine reasons that reading adds immeasurable benefits to our lives. I doubt that piece will ever lose its importance, and it might be the best of 1,300-plus posts I've written here over the past nearly 20 years. At 451words, it is an easy and quick read, so I encourage you to read it.

Before going there, you can find right here a tenth reason for reading as an indispensable activity: Reading deepens our empathy. It brings the world closer to us. It helps us to better understand other people, origins, cultures, desires, attitudes, and actions. Through choice, quality reading, we immerse ourselves in the aspirations, challenges, shortcomings, strengths, and courage of those whose struggles we share and, in many cases, whose lives are far harder than ours. We find common ground. We rediscover those ideas and dreams that make us all human. 

So sure, pick up a newspaper and a magazine, but a book too. Stretch yourself and read a broad range of topics. It will make you a better human being.  

The Value of Reading Outside Your Field

I have covered the value of reading for developing writers (like me) several times in this blog. Businesspeople should see their reading as of two types: inside and outside their field. 

Reading Inside Your Field

Focused reading inside our field helps to make us subject-matter experts. This reading includes industry journals, membership magazines, regulatory requirements, company reports, reviews, and proposals to learn more about the history, trends, and goals of our industry, as well as to capture the latest news about our competitors and collaborators.

Reading Outside Your Field

Focused reading outside our field enhances our writing style. This reading includes virtually all publications not covered by reading inside your field. Of the thousands of reading types, examples include a lawyer in the investment banking field reading African history, a civil engineer in the transportation industry reading classic novels, and a military officer reading biographies. It doesn't matter much what we read outside our field, as long as the writing is of high quality. Reading beyond the concerns of our business expands the choices of expression available to us. We pick up new words and varied sentence structure unlike those typical of our field. It also raises our awareness of the world beyond our cubicle.

Good writers not only write a lot; they also read a lot—inside and outside their field. 

Why and How to Write Better at Work

Writing is such a critical skill for employees in any profession, according to numerous corporate, government, and university websites, notably the Tulane University School for Professional Advancement. I am encouraged to argue this point because so many experienced frontline, managerial, and executive staff have made this point to me.  

We are living in a time that demands good writing skills. Most employees meet coworkers, clients, and vendors through email. In effect, writing has become our primary communication mode to inform, instruct, guide, encourage, or propose to people we have never met in person. Writing is our means of proving we have started or completed an assignment; tracked a project's progress, actions, and decisions; and suggested ways of improving the effectiveness or efficiency of a process, product, or organization. Our work-related documents testify to our clarity, thoughtfulness, responsiveness, and compliance, among other factors. What we write may lead to how our managers value, advance, support, and promote us. 

For at least these reasons, we can improve or reinforce our on-the-job writing by regularly engaging in three activities:

1. Read high-quality, management-approved documents. This practice includes critically reading operating instructions, meeting reviews, incident reports, root-cause analyses, staff appraisals, project reports, internal proposals, white papers, policy announcements, client consultations, and many more messages across your organization. Make those management-approved messages your quality target for  improving your writing skills.

2. Practice professional writing daily. If your writing responsibilities consist only of replying to inquiries, then write some inquiries yourself. If all you write are descriptions of processes and events, then write about how those descriptive documents bring value to your organization. If you compose solely analytical documents for supervisory review, then graduate to proposal writing for managerial review. Find reasons to write.

3. Seek feedback from coworkers whose writing skills you respect. When you ask coworkers for their opinions and suggestions, you honor them as a highly regarded source. Get feedback from at least two sources because you might find conflicting opinions, which is not a bad thing. You will learn a lot about the subjective nature of writing assessment. Look for patterns in your writing. Are your reviewers usually finding the same issues, such as completeness, organization, conciseness, sentence structure, word choice, and punctuation? If yes, focus more on those issues in your future writing assignments. 

The next post will discuss why reading outside one's field is as critical for writing improvement as reading inside it.

Notes on Beginning (and Developing) Readers

What is the best way to learn and teach reading? An article, "At a Loss for Words" by Emily Hanford in APM Reports, well summarizes three main reading instruction strategies and their evolution: phonics, whole word, and three-cueing. Briefly, phonics is based on associating individual letters with sounds; whole word consists of recognizing entire words without sounding them out phonetically; and three-cueing relies on some guessing based on semantics (sentence context), syntax (sentence structure), and graphics (visual appearance).     

From all my own research as both a student and a teacher of reading, I’ve concluded that  are all useful. Here's why.

Phonics

Phonics is good for matching the letters of certain base words with sounds, such a girl and in, and the more sophisticated boy and out, which have diphthongs. But more than 25% of English words cannot be learned phonetically (e.g., though, tough). The famous example of the absurdity of English is spelling fish as ghoti:

·       gh as in tough

·       o as in women

·       ti as in nation

Whole Word

So the whole word approach is necessary to simply memorize words like the homophones bail and bale, mail and male, pail and pale, and sail and sale. At least there’s a pattern in those examples, but what about air and heir vs. fair and fare, or one and won vs. none and nun? What about poor vs. pour? And how did the rhyming words bed, lead, and said get their spelling? We likely recognize these whole words as young readers before learning rules like “when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking,” which, by the way, does not work for seven of the example words in the previous sentences.

Three-Cueing

The three-cueing approach makes perfect sense, as in these examples:

• Graphically: If I’ve learned cat and man, I’d have a good chance of learning mat and can based on the similarities of their appearance in print.
• Syntactically:  If I come across the sentence, I love Mother and don’t know Mother, even at age six I can guess that I love nouns, (i.e., people, places, or things), but it couldn’t possibly be that I love verbs (go), adjectives (pretty), adverbs (happily), prepositions (of), conjunctions (and) or interjections (wow). I don’t need to know the definitions of parts of speech to figure that one out. So if the story is about a girl and her mother, I could correctly guess the word is mother. Of course, by purely guessing, I might think the sentence says I love trains, an error similar to one that children have made when reading to me.
• Semantically: If I read I walk from school all the way to my house and knew every word but house, I could guess the word is not jail, sea, or zoo because of the limitations of what my six-year-old self can own.

But three-cueing was not so novel when Ken Goodman “created” it in 1967, as the article claims. In fact, he just repackaged the whole word approach, which required us to see things graphically, and syntactically, semantically.

One more thing we do: we read backwards as well as forward. Look at this passage from The Cat in the Hat:

“The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house. All that cold, cold, wet day.” 

If I’ve just learned wet and cold, I’ll look back to their first sighting when I get to their second sighting. As a Dr. Seuss book veteran, I would know how the author depends on rhyming. So by the time I get to day, I’m sure it rhymes with play. And, if I’m really clever, I’ll know I sit in my house when it was too wet to play. So guessing, yes, but comparing and building on previous information too.

I’ll always remember in my doctoral program, a student pronounced paradigm as paradeem, not paradime, even though she heard the professor use the latter pronunciation in class. I thought either she did not connect his correct pronunciation with the word she came across in the assigned reading, or she wasn’t paying attention to his lecture. Then my thoughts shifted to when I learned that word only a few years earlier. I had never heard the word before until I read it in a book. The author was discussing Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, so I read that book next. Here’s the weird thing. I never had heard the word in speech; I only saw it in print, but I somehow correctly pronounced it in my head as paradime, dropping the g and giving the i a long sound, even though I had no other word ending to compare it with. So when my professor said paradigm, I knew how to spell it. I’d bet that the woman who mispronounced it was not as experienced a reader as I was. I think you get my point: we guess contextually more often than we think as readers.

A regular dose of all these approaches works for most children. Some will learn faster than others, as in everything else in life. But the slower ones will still learn. Yet having the right attitude is essential. The most memorable sentence in the article is the Molly Woodworth quote:  “[Reading] influences every aspect of your life." Let’s keep our eyes on the prize. Learn as much as you can about all three theories, draw your own conclusions, and read. 

The Value of Reading

Whether you are a first grader or a seasoned businessperson, reading is the first step in developing your writing skills for at least nine reasons.

1. Reading expands vocabulary. Different fields, genres, and writers have their own vocabulary. Developing writers who read eclectically can learn from these differences to advance their command of language.

2. Reading uncovers various writing styles. Writers can learn a lot from studying content organization, sentence structure, sentence and paragraph length, and punctuation usage. Looking purposefully at different styles of respected writers gives developing writers greater strategic choices.

3. Reading stimulates the mind. Reading demands more from the mind than watching television, playing video games, or ambling through the mall. It is an abstract task requiring deep concentration to retain what the author conveys. This skill transfers to writing in  vital ways.

4. Reading improves general knowledge. Global information is limitless, so reading exposes writers to endless possibilities. Transforming just a fragment of that data into a dramatic narrative or an incisive polemic is what makes a writer. 

5. Reading heightens critical thinking skills. The more writers read, the more they'll find conflicting evidence, forcing them to draw their own conclusions. They can do so only by serious reflection, exhaustive research, in-depth analysis, and thoughtful summations—the very skills they must use as writers.

6. Reading sharpens creativity. Since readers have to picture what they're reading, they must use their imagination. Exercising their mind in such a way gives them more efficient and effective access to that imaginative part of their mind when they need to write.

7. Reading inspires writing. Getting excited about a piece of writing can motivate readers to write something of their own, just as watching a favorite athlete might inspire amateurs to get on a court or field to engage in some sporting heroics of their own.

8. Reading cultivates awareness of the world. Readers are bound to come across new opinions about the world, some that reinforce their beliefs, others that create new beliefs, and still others that may reverse their beliefs. This open-mindedness will add to the depth of a developing writer's toolbox. 

9. Reading adds immeasurable value to quality of life. Reading is the thing we do to forget we're waiting for our doctor's appointment or standing in a line at the post office or being placed on an interminable hold by a service technician. Reading is a great escape from other troubles, a singular way of leaving the immediate aggravations of the world for an alternative one that may turn us to get a new idea, take a note of it, and write our next sentence. 

So if you want to be a better writer, read, read, read.