Reading, Writing and... and

I would never profess to being some literary savant. I only seem to speak my mother tongue fluently on good days. The rest of the time it seems like some kind of gibberish, however after extensive observation I have come to a simple conclusions about writing.

The best writers are first and foremost avid readers. Being an avid reader does more than broaden ones literary stockpile. It introduces the reader to a larger array of vocabulary; subsequently broadening their vocabulary. It exposes the reader to variations in syntactical choices, illustrating first hand what may or may not work. It doesn't matter what an individual reads, romance, mystery, comics, fiction, non-fiction, it is irrelevant; reading is reading. Read enough and they'll see it done right at some point.

It is a sad statement on the education system but I don't credit any of my teachers with teaching me how to write or find my voice. I credit Richard Adams, JRR Tolkien, Jonathan Swift, Brian Jacques, LM Montgomery, Anne McCaffrey, David James Duncan, John Green, Lloyd C. Douglas, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Gene Stratton-Porter,  and so many more mediocre and wonderful writers of the past and present. It was reading the body of their works, seeing and feeling the way they strung words and sentences together. I may have learned a lot in the classroom. I may have learned invaluable literary lessons in the classroom. I definitely learned the five paragraph essay and the difference between their, there and they're, in the classroom. Everything past that simple: introduction, body, body, body, conclusion, I learned from reading and observing the world around me. 

So my biased conclusion is this: Those that don't read, can't write.