Improving Writing Skills
HOW'S THE READING COMING ALONG? aka Conversation between a lover of reading and one who is not.
One of the best ways I know to improve your writing skills is to read books that challenge you to improve your reading skills. Sound crazy? Hard? Boring? Maybe so. Writing without reading, though, is akin to swimming without water. Did you ever look at your writing skills improvement in this way? Bet not.
How can you know what the written word looks like, a sentence, a paragraph, if you never see it that way? Oh, you say, you read information on the Internet daily. You use social media and write your heart out. You text friends. That's all reading and writing, no? No. None of these examples are ones of academic reading or writing. A good book, one of the classics, fills the gap you describe in your social and informational reading. Most sentence structure you find within online news organizations and social …show more content…
Not a problem. I am not advocating for grade school reading exercise in which everyone takes a turn standing up and reading aloud to the teacher. Nor do you have to have a book read in a certain amount of time unless you use a public library. In this case, though, you can always renew your book online, multiple times usually. Do you have a used bookstore nearby? These places are a reader's paradise! You can pick up paperback or hardback used books for a song quite often. At one point, this is how I grew my home book collection. Public libraries also have sales a couple of times a year to clean out their collections and offer books at bargain basement prices. If you own a Kindle or other e-reader, some book titles now fall in the eminent domain category; that means they no longer hold copyrights. Amazon.com offers some of these books for free for download to a Kindle or Cloud reader. Taking your time to read at your current speed does not have to be an issue at all. In fact, you may find your reading skill improves with more
One of the best ways I know to improve your writing skills is to read books that challenge you to improve your reading skills. Sound crazy? Hard? Boring? Maybe so. Writing without reading, though, is akin to swimming without water. Did you ever look at your writing skills improvement in this way? Bet not.
How can you know what the written word looks like, a sentence, a paragraph, if you never see it that way? Oh, you say, you read information on the Internet daily. You use social media and write your heart out. You text friends. That's all reading and writing, no? No. None of these examples are ones of academic reading or writing. A good book, one of the classics, fills the gap you describe in your social and informational reading. Most sentence structure you find within online news organizations and social …show more content…
Not a problem. I am not advocating for grade school reading exercise in which everyone takes a turn standing up and reading aloud to the teacher. Nor do you have to have a book read in a certain amount of time unless you use a public library. In this case, though, you can always renew your book online, multiple times usually. Do you have a used bookstore nearby? These places are a reader's paradise! You can pick up paperback or hardback used books for a song quite often. At one point, this is how I grew my home book collection. Public libraries also have sales a couple of times a year to clean out their collections and offer books at bargain basement prices. If you own a Kindle or other e-reader, some book titles now fall in the eminent domain category; that means they no longer hold copyrights. Amazon.com offers some of these books for free for download to a Kindle or Cloud reader. Taking your time to read at your current speed does not have to be an issue at all. In fact, you may find your reading skill improves with more