On Reading And Writing
“… I am just now beginning to discover the difficulty of expressing one’s ideas on paper. As long as it consists solely of description it is pretty easy; but where reasoning comes into play, to make a proper connection, a clearness & a moderate fluency, is to me, as I have said, a difficulty of which I had no idea …” – Charles Darwin
Reading (and writing) can be quite a hard thing, no matter how well formed your reading habit is.
If you’ll take time to read and learn to internalize the grammar and semantics of writings, that is, learn stuffs like context, eymology, meaning and formation of words, there’s basically no article you can’t grok no matter how intricate it may appear to be. You tend to be in the mind of the author of the article.
This means to be a successful reader, you must learn that art of reading.
Vanity Metrics
We most times pride ourselves in the number of books read but I think it’s far more important to “own” the content of a book to have merely read through a book.
On writing
A powerful idea clearly and simply written is better that a merely simple idea written with “powerful” and high sounding words. There’s the tendency for us to sound poetic, use unnecessary and redundant words, thereby introducing ambiguities into our ideas. Inn simplicity lies the power of communication.