With all the responsibilities that come with college life, carving out time for personal reading often feels like an impossible task. With nightly assignments piling up, the idea of delving into a book for pleasure can seem like a distant luxury. Despite this, I still think that squeezing in time in the evening to read for pleasure would prove to be beneficial. This belief comes from advice I received from a school librarian. She shared with us that she believed that becoming a better writer is directly related to reading exceptional writing.
It wasn’t until I reached a certain stage in my academic journey that I truly grasped the wisdom of her words. Frustration with my writing had reached its peak; I couldn’t help but notice that my work bore no resemblance to that of the authors I was reading. No matter how diligently I worked or read books on writing, significant improvements remained elusive. This was until one day I realized that I had made great strides after a period of reading for pleasure during a school break.
I learned that my writing improved more from observing styles and techniques in action than from reading about them in theory. This realization changed the way I think about reading from simply being a leisurely activity to also being a crucial building block for my growth in writing. It is comforting to know that one can enhance one’s writing skills by looking at the pages of other literary works.
