Avi

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Writing is not talking

read write AviWhen­ev­er I talk to young peo­ple I am asked, ”What can I do to make my writ­ing bet­ter?”  The answer is sim­ple: read.

The more you read the bet­ter your writ­ing will be. I has­ten to say, the qual­i­ty of what you read can make a dif­fer­ence, too. If you read a lot of good writ­ing, that read­ing will inter­nal­ize your writ­ing. You will start to think like a writer. It is as they say about learn­ing a new lan­guage: if you sur­round your­self with it, it starts to become your way of thinking.

In this con­text, accept this fun­da­men­tal premise: writ­ing is not talk­ing. For the most part, the gram­mar, vocab­u­lary, nar­ra­tive flow of lit­er­a­ture is, in many respects, a lan­guage with its own struc­ture, cadence, and log­ic. There is noth­ing inher­ent­ly nat­ur­al about it. It must be learned.

That is why I so often say, “Writ­ers don’t write writ­ing. They write reading.”

If you are young, and a would-be writer, the sim­ple truth is that it’s more impor­tant that you read than write. If you do not read, yet try to write, I don’t think you can suc­ceed very well.

So many peo­ple say to me, “I want to become an author.”

You become an author after you learn to write. And to write, you must first learn the lan­guage we call writing.

In short, read, read, read. And only then write.

3 thoughts on “Writing is not talking”

  1. Love the sim­plic­i­ty and truth in your words. I heard you say this in your pre­sen­ta­tion and noticed how this pro­found advice silenced the crowd for a moment. I appre­ci­ate hav­ing the same advice writ­ten in your blog so my stu­dents will be able to read, reflect, and write on it.

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  2. This is my aha moment for the day! An excel­lent reminder and a new approach to teach­ing my stu­dents writ­ing. We need to focus on more reading!

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  3. Thanks again for this reminder, Avi. The com­mit­ment is to REAL read­ing — not read­ing for CCSS or read­ing to go up anoth­er lev­el in Accel­er­at­ed Read­er, or read­ing to earn a piz­za par­ty — but read­ing for real, and lots of it.

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