Becoming a popular blogger, author of articles or books is a dream of many people now. The authors of webinars, trainings, schools promise to teach everyone to write in an interesting and exciting way. But as studies show, the ability to write is much more dependent on what and how we read.
To learn how to write, many believe, you just need to master certain technologies. In fact, technologies in this case are secondary and they can help those who already have a good base. And it’s not just about literary ability. The ability to write also directly depends on the experience of in-depth reading of complex texts.
This conclusion was made by cognitive psychologists from the University of Florida in a study involving 45 students. Among the volunteers were those who prefer light reading — genre literature, fantasy, science fiction, detective stories, sites like reddit. Others regularly read articles in academic journals, quality prose, and non-fiction.
All participants were asked to write a test essay, which was evaluated on 14 parameters. And it turned out that the quality of the texts directly correlated with the circle of reading. Those who read serious literature scored the most points, and those who liked superficial reading on the Internet scored the least. In particular, the language of readers was much richer, and the syntactic constructions were much more complex and varied.
Deep and surface reading
Unlike superficial entertaining texts, complex texts full of details, allusions, metaphors cannot be understood by looking at them tangentially. This requires what is called deep reading: slow and thoughtful.
Texts written in complex language and rich in meanings make the brain work intensively
Studies show that it perfectly trains the brain, activating and synchronizing those areas of it that are responsible for speech, vision and hearing.
These are, for example, Broca’s area, which allows us to perceive the rhythm and syntactic structure of speech, Wernicke’s area, which affects the perception of words and meaning in general, the angular gyrus, which plays a major role in providing language processes. Our brain learns the patterns that are present in complex texts and begins to reproduce them when we begin to write ourselves.
Read poetry…
A study published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies found that reading poetry activates the posterior cingulate cortex and medial temporal lobe, which are associated with introspection. When the participants in the experiment read their favorite poems, they had more activated areas of the brain associated with autobiographical memory. Also emotionally charged poetic texts activate some areas, mainly in the right hemisphere, which react to music.
… And prose
One of the most important skills for a person is the ability to understand the psychological state of other people. It helps us establish and maintain relationships, and helps the writer create characters with complex inner worlds. A number of experiments show that reading serious fiction improves participants’ performance on tests of understanding the emotions, thoughts, and states of others to a greater extent than reading non-fiction or superficial fiction.
But the time spent watching TV is almost always wasted, as our brain goes into a passive mode. In the same way, yellow magazines or frivolous novels can entertain us, but they do not develop us in any way. So if we want to get better at writing, we need to take the time to read serious fiction, poetry, science or art. Written in complex language and full of meanings, they make our brain work intensively.
For more details, see Quartz.