A note before you read on: this is one of my first posts, short and a bit underdeveloped compared to how I'd write it now. There wasn't really anything technically wrong in it—just a lot of typos I'm embarrassed by, and ideas I stated as one-liners that deserved more room to breathe. So I've cleaned it up and given them that room.
"… 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. Darwin—a man who wrote entire books that reshaped how we understand life on Earth—admitted, in a private letter, that plain descriptive writing came easily to him, but reasoning clearly on paper did not. I find that quietly reassuring every time I reread it. If it was hard for him, it's allowed to be hard for the rest of us too.
If you'll take the time to read and learn to internalize the grammar and semantics of writing—that is, learn things like context, etymology, and the 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 end up, in a small way, inside the mind of the author.
This means that to be a successful reader, you must learn the art of reading—and it really is a learnable art, not a fixed trait you either have or don't.
Reading as an active skill, not a passive one
I don't think I said this clearly enough the first time: reading well is not the same activity as moving your eyes across a page of text you already technically understand. There's a real difference between reading at a text and reading into one.
Reading into a text means noticing when a word is doing more work than its dictionary definition suggests, and asking why the author chose that word instead of a more obvious one. It means noticing the shape of an argument—where the author is building toward a claim, where they're hedging, where they're quietly assuming something they haven't actually argued for. It means being willing to stop and look something up rather than gliding past a term you half-recognize and hoping the sentence still makes sense without it. None of this is exotic. It's mostly just the difference between reading quickly and reading attentively, and choosing, deliberately, to do the latter for anything you actually want to keep.
Etymology in particular has quietly become one of my favorite tools for this. A word's history is very often a compressed argument for why it means what it means today, and once you see that history, the word stops being an arbitrary label and starts being something closer to a small idea in its own right. It's a cheap trick with a surprisingly high return: five minutes with a word's origin can make an entire paragraph built around it click into place.
Vanity metrics
We most times pride ourselves on the number of books read, but I think it's far more important to own the content of a book than to have merely read through it.
It's tempting to treat a reading list, or a "books read this year" counter, as the goal itself—it's countable, shareable, and satisfying to watch go up. But a stack of books skimmed and half-remembered is worth less than a handful of books you actually absorbed: books whose arguments you could reconstruct from memory, whose central claims you've actually tested against your own experience and found either convincing or wanting, and whose ideas have genuinely changed some small decision you've made since. Counting books is easy. Owning them is the actual point, and it's the part that doesn't show up on a counter.
This isn't an argument against reading widely or reading quickly when a text calls for it—some books are worth skimming, and that's a legitimate way to read them. It's an argument against letting the count become a proxy for the goal. The number is vanity; the understanding is the thing you were actually after.
On writing
A powerful idea clearly and simply written is better than a merely simple idea written with "powerful" and high-sounding words. There's a tendency for us to want to sound poetic, to use unnecessary and redundant words, and in doing so we introduce ambiguity into our own ideas rather than clarity. In simplicity lies the power of communication.
I think this tendency comes from a very understandable place: we want to sound like we've thought hard about something, and stacking up impressive-sounding words feels, in the moment, like evidence of that effort. But it almost always works backwards. A reader has to do real work to unpack an overwrought sentence, and that work is friction between your idea and their understanding of it—friction you added yourself, for no real benefit. The clearer and plainer the sentence, the less there is standing between what you meant and what the reader actually receives.
A few concrete habits I've come to lean on, for what they're worth:
- Prefer the concrete word over the abstract one. "The team missed the deadline because the vendor's API was down for six hours" tells you more, faster, than "there were external dependency-related delays impacting delivery timelines."
- Cut the word that isn't doing anything. Almost every sentence has at least one word you can delete without losing any meaning—"in order to" can usually just be "to," "due to the fact that" can usually just be "because." This is close to the oldest piece of writing advice there is, and it's old because it keeps being true.
- Say the plain version first, then decide if you need the fancier one. If you can't explain an idea in plain words at all, that's often a sign you don't fully understand it yet—not a sign that it needs more sophisticated language to convey.
- Read your own sentence back and ask what it would sound like said out loud, to a person, rather than written for a page. Writing tends to drift toward stiffness the moment you stop imagining an actual listener on the other end of it.
None of this means writing has to be flat or plain to the point of being boring—clarity and voice aren't in tension with each other. It just means the ornamentation, if there's going to be any, should sit on top of a clear idea, not substitute for one.
Reading and writing are the same skill, really
I think the reason this post ties the two together, rather than treating them as separate topics, is that they're really two directions of the same underlying skill: attentiveness to how meaning gets built out of words. Reading well trains you to notice when an author has built something clean, or when they've papered over a gap with vague language. Writing well is just applying that same noticing to your own drafts, before anyone else has to. The better a reader you become, the harder it gets to let your own sloppy sentences slide—which is, I'd say, one of the more reliable side effects of reading attentively for long enough.