Good Reading Is Essential for Good Writing
Many great writers have said it a million times: If you want to be a good writer, you have to be a good reader first. Judging from all there is to read on the internet, I think more people should heed this advice.
I love to read well-written work from writers who represent the best there is — like my personal favorite, Christopher Hitchens; of whom it was said that he couldn’t write a dull sentence even if he tried. Since Hitchens hasn’t been among us for quite a few years now, I always keep an eye out for other capable writers. One good starting point is the Pulitzer Prize. On their website, you can find all the winners from over the years — writers who are guaranteed to be a great read.
Two days ago they announced the 2022 winners of the Pulitzer Prizes in all the many different categories. I was delighted to see that writers from one of my favorite magazines, The Atlantic, were either runners-up or even a winner of the much-coveted prize.
In the category Feature Writing, staff writer Jennifer Senior won the Pulitzer Prize for what the jury called, “an unflinching portrait of a family’s reckoning with loss in the 20 years since 9/11, masterfully braiding the author’s personal connection to the story with sensitive reporting that reveals the long reach of grief.” What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind is indeed a gripping tale that left me with tears in my eyes in several paragraphs. I will certainly remember the phrase Life loves on for a long time to come.
When I read such a wonderfully crafted piece, I always read it in two distinctly different ways.
One is the way most people will read it, diving into the story and letting myself be swayed by the storytelling. The other is from a writer’s perspective; How do they form sentences? Are the sentences long? What is the punctuation like? Do they use difficult words, or precisely not? For instance, with Senior’s feature, I must admit I had to look up a few words. English not being my native language, I didn’t know what germane meant; nor did I know the meaning of the words inveterate, brine, off-kilter, redolent, and purloined. (I’ll let you do the Googling for fun.) To me, this makes the article all the more interesting — I wouldn’t have my articles any other way.
I know there are many readers and writers alike out there that are of a different opinion — “a message should be easy to understand to be powerful” — no Google necessary. With the abundance of written material of questionable degree available on the internet and the steady decline of (independent) in-depth journalism around the world, I can only hope there are enough people still looking to read well-formed sentences, paragraphs, features, and books, rich in syntax and choice of words — and even willing to pay for that.
