benefits of reading and writing essay

EnglishGrammarSoft

Essay on Benefits of Reading (1300 Words)

Reading helps our minds grow in ways that we can’t be taught in school or at home. No one is born with an innate love of reading, but everyone has the capacity for literacy, reading, and writing.

Reading is more than just something that you do on the bus or on the train. It’s a way of life. Reading is important because it allows us to escape into another world, see things from someone else’s perspective, and empathize with them.

Essay on Benefits of Reading

1 – what is reading.

Reading is the act of decoding letters on a page to extract information. For many, reading has become an everyday activity.

It might happen in the morning when you read your daily news before breakfast, in the evening when you read your favorite blog before bed, or even during the lunch break at work when you catch up on your phone for just five minutes.

For most people, it’s hard to imagine life without reading. However, not everyone can read. Around 15% of the world’s population has some form of learning disability that prevents them from being able to read. This means that they cannot interpret words and sentences on paper or digital screens.

Reading is one of the most popular hobbies in America, with nearly three-quarters of adults reading at least one book per year. Reading can take many forms, from novels to comics to magazines to blogs. It can be done privately or shared with friends.

Reading is good for the mind and body. Research shows that reading can reduce stress, improve sleep quality, promote empathy, and even increase lifespan by as much as two years!

2 – Importance of reading

The first thing to know about reading is that it’s not something that you should force your students to do. Reading should be something you engage them in, not something you force them to do.

Let them enjoy reading for what it is — something enjoyable and entertaining at the same time. Engaging students will help them get more out of reading and will set the stage for future academic success.

As an added bonus, you will both get more out of reading as a teacher and as a student. Empathy Reading opens up your mind to a whole new world. It can be uncomfortable at first, but remember to give them the tools to read the material. Not everyone is great at reading; let them know that you’re willing to help them along the way.

It’s important to read. It’s not some new-fangled, modern idea that everyone is championing, but rather a human instinct that has been with us since the beginning of time. Books are more than just storytellers — they offer understanding and insight into different cultures, languages, ages, genders, classes, ideologies.

Here are some of the many reasons why reading is important:

Reading is one of the most valuable skills anyone can have. It’s also one of the best ways to escape from reality and find yourself in a whole new world.
Reading is valuable for children’s development because it helps them learn different things quickly.
Reading improves your vocabulary which makes it easier for you to understand new words when you see them in your environment.
Reading is not only an activity for passing time or entertainment; it can be a way to learn about yourself and the world around you.
Reading is not only fun, but it can be educational, therapeutic, and even life-changing. When you get into a book, you get to know the characters on an emotional level, get lost in their stories, and experience what they’re feeling.

3 – The benefits of reading

Reading is the best way to learn new things, broaden your knowledge, and find inspiration. It also stimulates your brain.

Reading can help you keep your mind sharp and be in control of it. Reading in different genres helps you develop different skills in different ways.

People read to develop their vocabulary, expand their imagination, and to broaden their knowledge.

Reading opens up more doors than people may realize, so it should be a priority for everyone– whether you’re a preteen or an adult.

Reading helps people to become better thinkers and is the key to unlocking people’s minds.

4 – How to develop reading habit

Make sure you get some quiet time every day to read. If you have a regular day at work or school, read on your lunch breaks or after work. Make reading part of your daily routine.

Turn off all distractions when you’re reading, and find a comfortable spot to sit. Do you always have the TV on while you eat? Try turning off the TV, but continuing to watch it when you read.

Binge on your favorite authors. Choose a genre that you’re interested in and read everything written by that author. Then find another author and binge on their books as well. Go back to the beginning of that author’s series and read all of the books in that series.

Read also: How to avoid distractions while reading?

5 – Tips for Better Reading

Reading is a time-honored tradition that has been passed down from generation to generation. It’s believed that reading can improve your vocabulary, grammar, and spelling, as well as your comprehension skills.

Here are some tips for better reading:-

Know why you want to read. What are you getting out of reading? What are you looking for? If reading isn’t motivating enough for you, make reading something else. It’s okay to do something else.
Pick the right genre. Reading is fun, but it can also be a chore. That’s because our minds can be easily distracted. If you pick the wrong genre for you, you could end up reading to the point of exhaustion. But on the other hand, if you pick the right genre for you, you might learn new things, or get to know different characters better. Some genres include thrillers, romance novels, mysteries, science fiction, and even picture books. Choose the genre that works for you and read.
Read aloud to yourself. Listening to yourself reading is a great way to improve your skills. You can also do this if you are reading in a public space. You will help yourself realize when you read words wrong or catch on to grammar and sentence structure.
Never stop reading. If it’s not interesting for you, you’re going to get bored very fast. Just keep reading. There’s no need to read only what interests you; at the same time, you can’t read everything.
If you find yourself stuck in a book, don’t force yourself to finish it. If you don’t care for it, set it aside and come back to it later. You can only read a book or magazine a certain number of times before you might start to lose interest.

6 – How to read more

The first thing you can do is start reading more. Whether you want to read on an e-reader or a traditional book, the basic rules are the same:

Find the tpocs that are interesting.
Start with your topic of interest.
Listening to audiobooks will give you a great opportunity to step away from distractions and enjoy a book that you wouldn’t have the time or patience to read on your own. Audiobooks have been my best friend during the work week. Whether I’m commuting or heading out for a run, I’ve found that listening to a book or an audiobook on my commute helps me to listen and do both of those things at once.

Read also: Reading skills (types and strategies)

7 – Conclusion

Reading is something that everyone should do, so be sure to give it a try. There is no other form of education or experience that will give you more life knowledge than reading.

The benefits of reading are far-reaching. Reading can improve your vocabulary, brain function, and emotional intelligence. In addition, it can provide valuable insight into other cultures and worlds.

Common Noun: Definition, Examples, List and Exercise

In this post, you will learn about common noun definition, examples, lists, and exercises. Let’s take a dive into it! Common Noun Definition Common Noun…

Short Essay on Deforestation with subheadings

Deforestation is the clearing of forests on our planet. This essay will highlight the causes and problems of deforestation and how an individual can play…

61 Example Sentences with Zealous

Zealous describes a person who is determined, enthusiastic, and energetic while doing their job. Zealous people have a very high professional motivation and they try…

Free Printable Chart of Preposition

Hello There, If you are reading this, then it is obvious that you are interested in more information about “Printable Chart of Preposition”. What are…

Essay on Education for All in English | Importance of Education in Life & Society

A Short and Comprehensive Essay on Education for All Education, just like other factors, can have an influence on the behavior, attitude, and personality of…

Present Perfect Continuous Worksheet with Answers

Present Perfect Continuous Worksheet He __________ for two hours. (run) He __________ flute since evening. (play) The moon __________ in the sky since night. (shine)…

Importance of Reading Essay

500+ words essay on reading.

Reading is a key to learning. It’s a skill that everyone should develop in their life. The ability to read enables us to discover new facts and opens the door to a new world of ideas, stories and opportunities. We can gather ample information and use it in the right direction to perform various tasks in our life. The habit of reading also increases our knowledge and makes us more intellectual and sensible. With the help of this essay on the Importance of Reading, we will help you know the benefits of reading and its various advantages in our life. Students must go through this essay in detail, as it will help them to create their own essay based on this topic.

Importance of Reading

Reading is one of the best hobbies that one can have. It’s fun to read different types of books. By reading the books, we get to know the people of different areas around the world, different cultures, traditions and much more. There is so much to explore by reading different books. They are the abundance of knowledge and are best friends of human beings. We get to know about every field and area by reading books related to it. There are various types of books available in the market, such as science and technology books, fictitious books, cultural books, historical events and wars related books etc. Also, there are many magazines and novels which people can read anytime and anywhere while travelling to utilise their time effectively.

Benefits of Reading for Students

Reading plays an important role in academics and has an impactful influence on learning. Researchers have highlighted the value of developing reading skills and the benefits of reading to children at an early age. Children who cannot read well at the end of primary school are less likely to succeed in secondary school and, in adulthood, are likely to earn less than their peers. Therefore, the focus is given to encouraging students to develop reading habits.

Reading is an indispensable skill. It is fundamentally interrelated to the process of education and to students achieving educational success. Reading helps students to learn how to use language to make sense of words. It improves their vocabulary, information-processing skills and comprehension. Discussions generated by reading in the classroom can be used to encourage students to construct meanings and connect ideas and experiences across texts. They can use their knowledge to clear their doubts and understand the topic in a better way. The development of good reading habits and skills improves students’ ability to write.

In today’s world of the modern age and digital era, people can easily access resources online for reading. The online books and availability of ebooks in the form of pdf have made reading much easier. So, everyone should build this habit of reading and devote at least 30 minutes daily. If someone is a beginner, then they can start reading the books based on the area of their interest. By doing so, they will gradually build up a habit of reading and start enjoying it.

Frequently Asked Questions on the Importance of Reading Essay

What is the importance of reading.

1. Improves general knowledge 2. Expands attention span/vocabulary 3. Helps in focusing better 4. Enhances language proficiency

What is the power of reading?

1. Develop inference 2. Improves comprehension skills 3. Cohesive learning 4. Broadens knowledge of various topics

How can reading change a student’s life?

1. Empathy towards others 2. Acquisition of qualities like kindness, courtesy

Register with BYJU'S & Download Free PDFs

Our Mission

Explaining the Symbiotic Relationship Between Reading and Writing

Students who understand how reading relates to writing and vice versa can develop into better writers.

For elementary school teachers, the saying is, students learn to read and then read to learn. At the middle and high school levels, teachers may experience the relationship of first writing to read, and then reading to write. Although this expression is not so common, there are resources that point to such a relationship, including ” Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading ” or books such as The Write to Read .

While the relationship of “writing to read” and “reading to write” represents a symbiotic one, there is a distinct difference that may help us better understand what we are teaching students.

Writing to Read

When a student is writing to read, they are using writing as a tool to truly understand the reading. Writing to read is driven by the text the student is studying.

Examples of writing to read

Write a high-level summary to remember and consolidate the content of the reading.
Write a claim about the reading, and use three pieces of evidence to support it.
Respond to open-ended questions about the reading as a way to connect to or analyze the text.
Write an essay on a book to illuminate a particular theme or provide evidence to trace tonal shifts in the piece.
Write about the content of a particular text or texts to understand, analyze, or evaluate the text(s) at a deeper level.
Annotate during reading to capture important terms, ideas, or content.
Fill in graphic organizers or take notes to track the reading.
Write in response to a prompt.
Write an essay about a particular literary device or critical feature of the text(s).

Reading to Write

When a student is reading to write, they are using reading as a tool to improve their writing. Reading to write occurs when students first learn how to imitate their favorite authors, historians, scientists, or researchers. This is the deliberate use of mentor texts to mold a student’s writing ability.

Examples of reading to write

Read memoirs or personal essays to prepare to write a college essay.
Read several articles from a particular journal or newspaper to increase knowledge of stylistic expectations in preparation to write a piece for publication.
To help relieve writer’s block, use reading to think about different ways to write.
Read widely on a topic to consider one’s own writing approach and background knowledge.
Review multiple texts to write for a particular purpose or on a specific topic.
Read a lot to write more by picking out the ideas that spark thinking.
Maintain an annotated bibliography of mentor texts that serve as a writing coach.

Moving Toward Reading to Write

The developmental progression from reader to writer is specific to each student’s experience; however, we do know that in order to strengthen their ability to write, students must continue to read more.

Reading feeds writing. When writing dries up or stalls, the best way to revitalize it is to feed your brain with more reading. Reading may be compared to eating the nutrients we need for the energy to write. Reading feeds the writer with ideas for structure, rich language, literary moves, and compelling ways to illuminate a writer’s purpose.

After filling our brain with reading, turning back to writing typically gives one the energy needed to continue. This is one reason why writing to read is so important early on, then gradually becomes just as important as reading to write. As students develop confidence and competence as readers as the content and vocabulary become much more sophisticated, they build capacity to see the text as both a reader and a writer.

There are potential benefits of looking at the writing-to-read and reading-to-write relationship as teachers continue to challenge themselves with the best way to teach students how to write. Many times at the middle and high school levels, experience with writing to read is the dominant one. If this is the case, it might be a good time to rethink instructional goals and associated assessments.

Here are some practical suggestions for how to weave the two more seamlessly so that students grow into stronger writers.

Assignments that Weave in Reading to Write

After students complete a writing-to-read activity, have them complete a second activity that asks them to use the same text as a reading-to-write activity. (Models and research on how to use mentor texts can be found in books by Allison Marchetti and Rebekah O’Dell .) The second activity may be practice captured in the writer’s notebook for the student to use as a resource to support their writing throughout the year. Some examples of such activities may include the following:

Write a high-level summary of the text, then pick sentences from the text that use punctuation or sentence structure in a way that is powerful.
Write a claim along with supporting evidence, then look at the text to pick out the best use of transitions.
Annotate a book to trace character development, then pull out parts of the book that were written with vivid, descriptive language.
Write an essay on the theme of a book, then write a reflection on the author’s craft.
Write a response to reading to analyze the author’s line of reasoning, then break down the formal structure of the argument.

After high school, students contribute even more to society, so they need to know how to cogently express their thinking to others. Empowering students as writers requires practice, and it’s important that students understand how writing to read and reading to write serve them in markedly different ways.

Would you like to explore a topic?

LEARNING OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL

Or read some of our popular articles?

Free downloadable english gcse past papers with mark scheme.

19 May 2022

The Best Free Homeschooling Resources UK Parents Need to Start Using Today

Joseph McCrossan
18 February 2022

How Will GCSE Grade Boundaries Affect My Child’s Results?

Akshat Biyani
13 December 2021

Benefits of Reading: Positive Impacts for All Ages Everyday

May 26, 2023

From apps to social media to Netflix to video games, there are so many ways to fill your free time that it can be hard to decide what to do. It’s also easy to overlook one of the most fulfilling and beneficial pastimes ever created. Let’s look at the main benefits of reading and how you can highlight them to your child.

What are the main benefits of reading books?

Benefits of reading before bed.

Benefits of reading to children

Benefits of reading out loud

Why is reading important.

Does listening to audiobooks have the same benefits?

What are the benefits of reading fiction?

What are the benefits of reading poetry, it’s a gym for your brain.

The act of reading is a remarkable mental feat and reading comprehension uses a lot of your brain power. When you’re thumbing through a novel you’re building a whole world of people, places and events in your mind and remembering it all as you follow the story. This gives your imagination and memory a thorough workout and strengthens networks in various other parts of your brain too. 💪

If you’re reading a non-fiction book you’re also getting an in-depth experience of a subject full of facts and details that you need to hold in your mind to follow the arguments of the writer.

It’s well known that your memory improves with use as new memories are created and connected to older ones, making them stronger and easier to recall. Scientists have even found that the other parts of the brain activated by reading can continue to improve days after you’ve stopped reading, meaning even just a little bit of reading can go a long way.

It improves your focus

From Insta stories to tweets to TikTok videos, information is being packaged into ever smaller chunks and researchers believe our attention spans are getting shorter. However, being able to concentrate on one thing for long periods and ignore distractions is essential for school and for work. Reading is an excellent way to improve your concentration skills and the more you read, the better you’ll be able to focus. 🔍

It expands your vocabulary

Reading expands your vocabulary more than any other activity. A rich vocabulary allows you to understand the world in a more sophisticated way. Reading is also great for your grammar skills and lets you communicate your thoughts and ideas more accurately in all areas of your life.

It’s an education

Reading is the key to knowledge. Reading non-fiction books means you can learn about any subject you choose in as much detail as you want. Fiction allows you to learn about how other people all over the world live their lives and to put yourself in their shoes. This is a great way to improve your empathy and learn to approach other people with an open mind.

It helps your problem-solving skills

Reading fiction is also fantastic preparation to learn how to solve various types of problems you may not yet have encountered in your own life. You get the chance to follow the characters through all kinds of situations and find out how they deal with challenges big and small.

Maybe they make the right choices or maybe they don’t, either way, the writer has put a lot of thought and consideration into their story and you can always learn something from a character’s experiences. 🧩

It’s good therapy

Reading about difficult situations characters or real people experience can be hugely beneficial as well. It can be useful to read both fiction and non-fiction books about something you’re going through. Books can act as a type of therapy and help you to feel less alone in your situation.

This bibliotherapy has proven effective in helping people deal with issues such as depression or other mood disorders. The NHS even prescribes books to help people through its Reading Well programme!

Books offer the best value-for-money entertainment anywhere! There’s no expensive equipment to buy, no tickets to pay for and no monthly subscription fee. All you need is a library card for your local branch and you’re good to go!

Your nearest library probably has tens of thousands of different books available, so you’re sure to find a title to hook you. If they don’t have something in particular you're looking for, you can even ask the librarian to order it from another library.

Some libraries even offer ebooks on loan which you can add to your ereader or tablet 🏛️

It’ll inspire your child

If your children regularly see you reading you’ll be setting a good example. Children tend to copy what they see their parents do and they’ll soon be joining you storybook in hand for some quiet time you can enjoy together.

It’s great for stress

It’s not most people’s first idea of a relaxation technique, but reading does an awesome job of helping you manage stress. According to research, reading can lead to a lower heart rate and blood pressure and a calmer mind and just six minutes of reading can bring your stress levels down by more than 66%.

It helps you live longer!

If you still need another reason to commit yourself to read more, how about this: reading can actually help you live longer! Researchers discovered that those who read for half an hour a day had a 23% chance of living longer than people who didn’t read very much. In fact, readers lived around two years longer than non-readers! 🌳

So, if we’ve convinced you that you and your family need more reading in your lives, when is the best time to do it? Well, reading at bedtime allows you to kill two birds with one stone.

It helps you get a good night’s sleep

Despite its importance, many of us don’t follow good sleep hygiene and spend the hours before bedtime staring at screens big and small, leading to difficulty falling asleep and affecting the quality of our slumber. The NHS found that one in three of us experience poor sleep.

Choose to read an actual book before bedtime instead of checking your social media or watching Netflix and you can look forward to a better night’s rest. Reading fiction is a good way of relaxing the body and calming your mind and preparing for bed and has been shown to be as relaxing as meditation. 💤

It calms your child

If you treat your child to story time and read to them just before they go to bed you’ll discover that it’s perfect for calming them down and getting them in the right mood for sleep. As a bonus, they’ll get used to sitting still and concentrating on one thing for a long time.

Benefits of reading to children

Children can eventually enjoy all the benefits of reading mentioned above but whether they are too small to read much themselves or they just enjoy listening to you tell them a story, they can get some extra value out of the experience if you read to them regularly yourself.

It gives them a love of learning

If you start by reading to your child you can get them hooked on books and start a habit that will last them throughout their lives and repay your investment over and over again. Children who learn to read for pleasure will go on to enjoy greater academic success throughout their education according to research. 👩🏽‍🎓

It gives them a head-start

Even if your little one is a toddler who isn’t ready to start reading storybooks by themselves, you can give their literacy skills an early boost and teach them to read by reading to them yourself. They might not understand everything but they’ll pick up enough to get the idea. Let them see the words on the page as you read and encourage them to turn the page when you get to the last word.

By reading to them you’ll be helping them follow the natural rhythms of language, practise their listening skills and expose them to vocabulary they might not get to hear in their day-to-day lives.

It brings you together

Time spent reading to your child is a wonderful chance to create some beautiful, cosy, loving memories together and strengthen your bond. It will become something like a regular adventure you and your child can look forward to doing together and will remember all your lives. 👩‍👦

It also gives you lots to talk about later and you can have enjoyable discussions about the characters, plots, dilemmas and mysteries you discover during your reading time.

Even when your child starts to read for themselves, you don’t need to stop your shared storytime. You can swap it up, with them taking on the role of the reader as you listen or you can take turns reading to each other.

You’ve probably been taught that the best method of reading is in silence. However, research has found that quiet reading isn’t actually always the better option and that there are in fact some benefits of reading out loud. 📢

It helps you understand

It turns out that speaking as you read can help you understand texts better. You probably read aloud more than you realise. If you’ve ever received a slightly convoluted message or email or you’ve tried to read confusing legal jargon, you’ve probably found yourself repeating the words out loud to more clearly understand what was meant. ✅

It helps you remember

Or perhaps you’ve tried to memorise a phone number or the lines of a speech and you automatically started to say the information aloud to help you remember.

Psychologists call this the “production effect” and have discovered that these tactics do actually help people remember things more easily, especially children. 📚

Research from Australia showed that children who were told to read out loud recognized 17% more words compared to children who were asked to read silently. In another study, adults were able to identify 20% more words they had read aloud.

The theory is that because reading aloud is an active process it makes words more distinctive, and so easier to remember. 🧠

Why read?

Reading is the most effective way to get information about almost everything and is the key ingredient in learning for school, work and pleasure. On top of this, reading boosts imagination, communication, memory, concentration, and empathy. It also lowers stress levels and leads to a longer life.

Does listening to audiobooks have the same benefits as reading books?

It can be hard to concentrate for a long time and the experience of reading. With a real book you can quickly scan your eyes back over the page to reread what you’ve missed, this isn’t so easy with an audiobook. A psychology study showed that students who read material did 28% better on a test than those who heard the same material as a podcast.

Reading fiction is a useful way to develop your empathy, social skills and emotional intelligence. Fictional stories allow you to put yourself in other people's shoes and see things from various perspectives. In fact, brain scans show that many of the parts of the brain you use to interact with other people are also activated when you’re reading fiction.

Poetry is the home of the most creative, imaginative and beautiful examples of language and allows you to connect those powerful lines to real emotions all of us feel. Poetry is also efficient and a good poet can reveal deep ideas with a simple phrase. Reading poetry can also inspire your creativity and write some expressive verse of your own!

Reading is something most of us have been doing all our lives and as a result, we can easily take it for granted, but it’s a great all-around experience for your mind and spirit. So, it's really worth digging out your library card and finding books you and your child can read together.

If your child is having problems with reading, here at GoStudent we have education experts on standby to give you and them a helping hand in improving their literacy skills or any other learning challenges they need support with. Schedule a free trial lesson with GoStudent today!

4 Surprising Disadvantages of Homeschooling

By Andrea Butler

What are the Hardest GCSEs? Should You Avoid or Embrace Them?

By Clarissa Joshua

15 of the Best Children's Books That Every Young Person Should Read

By Sharlene Matharu
March 2, 2023
10 min read

Ultimate School Library Tips and Hacks

By Natalie Lever
March 1, 2023

How to Write the Perfect Essay: A Step-By-Step Guide for Students

By Connie Kulis-Page
June 2, 2022

Book a free trial session

Reading and Writing for Understanding

Posted July 21, 2005
By Sarah O'Brien Mackey

Secondary school students can benefit enormously when teachers of all subjects integrate reading and writing strategies into their instruction, according to Harvard Graduate School of Education Lecturer Vicki Jacobs . These strategies, typical of "reading and writing to learn" and "reading and writing across the curriculum," are problem-solving activities designed to help students move from simply knowing a fact to understanding a fact's significance. Helping students make that leap — from knowing to understanding — represents the very heart of the educational enterprise.

This summary is based on Jacobs' article, " Reading, Writing, and Understanding, " which appeared in the November 2002 edition of Educational Leadership .

Reading to Learn

Jacobs explains that students learn and practice beginning reading skills through about the third grade, building their knowledge about language and letter-sound relationships and developing fluency in their reading. Around fourth grade, students must begin to use these developing reading skills to learn — to make meaning, solve problems, and understanding something new. They need to comprehend what they read through a three-stage meaning-making process.

Stage One: Prereading

It's not uncommon for a struggling secondary reader to declare, "I read last night's homework, but I don't remember anything about it (let alone understand it)!" According to Jacobs, "How successfully students remember or understand the text depends, in part, on how explicitly teachers have prepared them to read it for clearly defined purposes."

During the prereading stage, teachers prepare students for their encounter with the text. They help students organize the background knowledge and experience they will use to solve the mystery of the text. To do so, they must understand the cultural and language-based contexts students bring to their reading, their previous successes or failures with the content, and general ability to read a particular kind of text. Based on this assessment, teachers can choose strategies that will serve as effective scaffolds between the students' "given" and the "new" of the text.

Asking such questions as, "What do I already know and what do I need to know before reading?" or "What do I think this passage will be about, given the headings, graphs, or pictures?" helps students anticipate the text, make personal connections with the text, and help to promote engagement and motivation. Brainstorming and graphic organizers also serve to strengthen students' vocabulary knowledge and study skills.

Stage Two: Guided Reading

Students move on to guided reading, during which they familiarize themselves with the surface meaning of the text and then probe it for deeper meaning. Effective guided-reading activities allow students to apply their background knowledge and experience to the "new." They provide students with means to revise predictions; search for tentative answers; gather, organize, analyze, and synthesize evidence; and begin to make assertions about their new understanding. Common guided-reading activities include response journals and collaborative work on open-ended problems. During guided reading, Jacobs recommends that teachers transform the factual questions that typically appear at the end of a chapter into questions that ask how or why the facts are important.

The ability to monitor one's own reading often distinguishes effective and struggling readers. Thus, guided-reading activities should provide students with the opportunity to reflect on the reading process itself — recording in a log how their background knowledge and experience influenced their understanding of text, identifying where they may have gotten lost during reading and why, and asking any questions they have about the text. As with prereading, guided-reading activities not only enhance comprehension but also promote vocabulary knowledge and study skills.

Stage Three: Postreading

During postreading, students test their understanding of the text by comparing it with that of their classmates. In doing so, they help one another revise and strengthen their arguments while reflecting and improving on their own.

Writing to Learn

Writing is often used as a means of evaluating students' understanding of a certain topic, but it is also a powerful tool for engaging students in the act of learning itself. Writing allows students to organize their thoughts and provides a means by which students can form and extend their thinking, thus deepening understanding. Like reading-to-learn, writing can be a meaning-making process.

Research suggests that the most effective way to improve students' writing is a process called inquiry. This process allows students to define and test what they would like to write before drafting. To help students prepare their arguments, teachers guide them through the three stages of writing-based inquiry:

Stating specific, relevant details from personal experience;
Proposing observations or interpretations of the text; and
Testing these assertions by predicting and countering potential opposing arguments. Through inquiry, students discover and refine something worth writing about.

Writing-to-learn activities can include freewriting (writing, without editing, what comes to mind), narrative writing (drawing on personal experience), response writing (writing thoughts on a specific issue); loop writing (writing on one idea from different perspectives) and dialogue writing (for example, with an author or a character.) "Not surprisingly," writes Jacobs, "writing-to learn activities are also known as 'writing-to-read' strategies — means by which students can engage with text in order to understand it."

Reading, writing, and understanding

The relationship among reading, writing, and understanding is clear. Students engaged in reading-to-learn will also be prepared to write well. In turn, students who are engaged in writing-to-learn will become more effective readers. Through both approaches, students will gain a better understanding of material and a greater ability to demonstrate that understanding.

Staff Development

Jacobs recommends that teachers who are considering whether to implement reading-to-learn and writing-to-learn strategies into their classroom first define their own instructional goals. If teachers decide that their goals for students' learning include "understanding," then they might ask themselves such questions as, "What strategies do I use to prepare my students to read a text?" or "How explicitly do I share with students the purpose of an assignment?" As Jacobs sees it, "Only after teachers have examined whether teaching for understanding suits their instructional goals and after they have defined their role in facilitating understanding can they consider how the principles and practices of reading-to-learn and writing-to-learn might support their instruction."

For those teachers who decide that teaching for understanding does indeed suit their instructional goals, the framework offered in Jacobs' article can help them skillfully integrate reading-to-learn and writing-to-learn strategies across their instruction.

Usable Knowledge

Connecting education research to practice — with timely insights for educators, families, and communities

A middle school debater from New York City

Word Generation at Work

The Bilingual Learner's Journey

A new lens on how teachers can support English-language learners by affirming their identities

The Applied Science of Learning

By aligning instruction with the science of learning, educators can to help their students better absorb lessons in the classroom

30,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today

Meet top uk universities from the comfort of your home, here’s your new year gift, one app for all your, study abroad needs, start your journey, track your progress, grow with the community and so much more.

Verification Code

An OTP has been sent to your registered mobile no. Please verify

Thanks for your comment !

Our team will review it before it's shown to our readers.

School Education /

📖Essay on Importance of Reading: Samples in 100, 150, and 250 Words

Updated on
Apr 26, 2024

Language learning requires four skills i.e. Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing. It is an important part that eventually builds up the communication skills of a person. Reading will help in attaining knowledge of variable fields. It enhances the intellect of a person. Reading helps students to enhance their language fluency. Students must adopt the habit of reading good books. Reading books can also improve the writing skills. If you are a school student and searching for a good sample essay on the importance of reading then, you landed at the right place. Here in this blog, we have covered some sample essays on the importance of reading!

Table of Contents

1 Essay on the Importance of Reading in 100 Words
2 Essay on Importance of Reading 150 Words
3 Essay on Importance of Reading 250 Words
4 Short Essay on Importance of Reading

Essay on the Importance of Reading in 100 Words

The English language is considered the global language because it is the most widely spoken language worldwide. Reading is one of the important parts of acquiring complete knowledge of any language. Reading helps in maintaining a good vocabulary that is helpful for every field, whether in school, interviews , competitive exams , or jobs.

Students must inculcate the habit of reading from a young age. Making a habit of reading good books will eventually convert into an addiction over time and you will surely explore a whole new world of information.

Being exposed to different topics through reading can help you look at the wider perspective of life. You will eventually discover a creative side of yours while developing the habit of reading.

Essay on Importance of Reading 150 Words

Reading is considered an important aspect that contributes to the development of the overall personality of any person. If a person wants to do good at a professional level then he/she must practice reading.

There are various advantages of reading. It is not only a source of entertainment but also opens up the creative ability of any person. Reading helps in self-improvement, enhances communication skills, and reduces stress. It is one of the sources of pleasure and also enhances the analytical skills.

Here are some of the best books to study that may help you enhance your reading skills:

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling .
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee .
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri .
Pride and Prejudice
The Great Gatsby

A person with good reading skills would be able to communicate with more confidence and shine brighter at the professional level. Reading is a mental exercise, as it can provide you with the best experience because while reading fiction, or non-fiction you use your imagination without any restrictions thereby exploring a whole new world on your own. So, Just Enjoy Reading!

Also Read: Communication Skills to Succeed at Work

Essay on Importance of Reading 250 Words

Reading is a language skill necessary to present yourself in front of others because without being a good reader, it’s difficult to be a good communicator. Reading books should be practised regularly. Books are considered a human’s best friend.

It is right to say that knowledge can’t be stolen. Reading enhances the knowledge of a person. There are numerous benefits of reading.

I love reading books and one of my all-time favorite authors is William Shakespeare. His work “As You Like It” is my favourite book. By reading that book I came across many new words. It enabled me to add many words to my vocabulary that I can use in my life.

Apart from this, there are many other benefits of reading books such as reading can help you write in a certain way that can impress the reader. It also enhances communication skills and serves as a source of entertainment .

Schools conduct various competitions which directly or indirectly involve reading. Some such competitions include debate, essay writing competitions, elocution, new reading in assembly, etc. All such activities require active reading because without reading a person might not be able to speak on a specific topic.

All such activities are conducted to polish the language skills of students from the very beginning so that they can do good at a professional level.

In conclusion, in a world of technological advancement, you are more likely to get easy access to online reading material available on the internet. So, you must not miss this opportunity and devote some time to reading different kinds of books.

Short Essay on Importance of Reading

Find a sample of a short essay on importance of reading below:

Kajal Thareja

Hi, I am Kajal, a pharmacy graduate, currently pursuing management and is an experienced content writer. I have 2-years of writing experience in Ed-tech (digital marketing) company. I am passionate towards writing blogs and am on the path of discovering true potential professionally in the field of content marketing. I am engaged in writing creative content for students which is simple yet creative and engaging and leaves an impact on the reader's mind.

Connect With Us

30,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today.

Resend OTP in

Need help with?

Study abroad.

UK, Canada, US & More

IELTS, GRE, GMAT & More

Scholarship, Loans & Forex

Country Preference

New Zealand

Which English test are you planning to take?

Which academic test are you planning to take.

Not Sure yet

When are you planning to take the exam?

Already booked my exam slot

Within 2 Months

Want to learn about the test

Which Degree do you wish to pursue?

When do you want to start studying abroad.

January 2024

September 2024

What is your budget to study abroad?

How would you describe this article ?

Please rate this article

We would like to hear more.

Have something on your mind?

Make your study abroad dream a reality in January 2022 with

India's Biggest Virtual University Fair

Essex Direct Admission Day

Why attend .

Don't Miss Out

Non-Fiction
Author’s Corner
Reader’s Corner
Writing Guide
Book Marketing Services
Write for us

Why Reading is Essential for Improving Essay Writing Skills

why reading is essential for improving essay writing skills? There are several ways we can draw a connection between reading and writing skills where some ways both skills benefit each other.

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” ― Dr. Seuss, I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!

When we think about improving students’ writing skills we tend to think of spelling, grammar, phonemic awareness and phonics. Recently, studies have shown that working with students to improve their reading skills can have an impact on their essay writing.

Because most students don’t like to read, the vast majority of them find writing essays to be even more of a daunting task. According to BetterWrititngServices.com , essay writing services are extremely popular among college students, and the number of websites that sell academic papers to students grows rapidly. For this reason, it is important to help students improve their writing skills.

In this article, we will cover why reading is essential for improving essay writing skills. There are several ways we can draw a connection between reading and writing skills where some ways both skills benefit each other.

Mechanics of writing

We often teach reading and writing as two separate subjects, but students cannot complete a writing task if they cannot read and understand the instructions. These two skills are intertwined and both equally important to students’ success.

Reading serves not only to expose the student to different styles of writing but also supports them in their emerging skills.

The most well-known benefit reading has on writing skills is the increased exposure to different words. The more students read, the more it exposes them to alternative ways to use words they are both familiar and not familiar with.

The more students read, the bigger chance that they will learn new ways to structure their sentences and express their ideas. Reading allows them to learn new patterns they can use in their own writing.

The more well-read the writer is, the better grasp they have on understanding poor writing versus quality writing. This will allow students to make this identification more clear in their own written work.

Power of words

Essays are a tool used to get an idea across, make a point, prove something, or tell a story. The more students read, the more access they have to literature that seeks to make the same things happen.

It gives more weight to the words themselves and by extension more weight to what the students write.

Reading is also a proven way to support the development of imagination. While reading, we tend to picture the events in our mind’s eyes based on what we are reading. This has been shown to support your ability to understand situations and the solutions from the text.

Developing their voice

Without reading a variety of different authors and texts, it is hard for students to understand the idea of the voice of the author. The more students are exposed to different authors, the more courage and sense of self they develop for their own writing.

The more we expose students to different writing styles (classics, modern-day fiction and nonfiction), the more we support them in crafting their own voice for essay writing.

The development of a unique voice is an important skill needed to write essays, and it will aid in setting them apart from their peers.

Keeping up with the times

Language is something that is ever-changing, even in the world of essays. The words and phrases used by a student can change from year to year. Reading is essential for students who want to stay informed about modern language and style changes.

APA and MLA are always evolving in order for students to understand these changes. They need to see how they are implemented in various forms of writing.

Outside of the evaluation of different citation reading keeps students involved in learning the ways modern writing is changing.

Entwining reading and writing in the classroom

For those in education looking to improve their students’ essay writing skills, there are a few ways reading and writing can be taught together for the most benefit to the student.

Note-taking is the easiest way to aid students in their reading and writing skills. Having your students take notes on what they have read not only increases their deep reading skills, but benefits their writing as well.

Students do not just write one form of essay, they write personal essays, persuasive essays, they compare and contrast, so why are they only reading one thing? In order for students to understand the different tones and syntax required for these different forms of essays, they need to read them.

Exposing your students to different forms of literature broadens their ideas on what their next essay could be.

Genre Study

By selecting one genre for students to narrow their field of study it allowed them to learn the specific genre before they experiment with writing within that genre.

Letting students take the lead fosters their interest and independence in their language skills.

For teachers who find themselves struggling with ways to improve their student’s essay writing this may be the perfect solution. We know that we are more likely to complete certain tasks when we are motivated.

Thus it would make sense that if we allow students to pick the genre they both read and write about, they will be more motivated as well. Allow students to pick their own reading materials, then craft the writing work around their chosen piece.

In conclusion

The ways of teaching reading and writing separately are changing as more of us in education understand that reading is vital to essay writing skills.

As a basic level skill, students need to understand the written instruction before they can write the essay. In addition, the more well read students are the more vocabulary and grammar they are absorbing that is then transferred to their own writing.

The more students reading is spread out of topics and genres the deeper understanding they develop on the topics they are then to write essays about.

The absorption of knowledge that happens through the process of reading is integral to students improving their essay writing skills.

Why Leaflets are Essential for Small Business Marketing

10 effective reading strategies for better comprehension, the best note-taking strategies for readers, how to choose the right reading environment for you, 10 thought-provoking book club discussion questions to spark lively literary debates, more like this related, book marketing and promotion services.

We provide genuine and custom-tailored book marketing services and promotion strategies. Our services include book reviews and social media promotion across all possible platforms, which will help you in showcasing the books, sample chapters, author interviews, posters, banners, and other promotional materials. In addition to book reviews and author interviews, we also provide social media campaigning in the form of contests, events, quizzes, and giveaways, as well as sharing graphics and book covers. Our book marketing services are very efficient, and we provide them at the most competitive price.

The Book Marketing and Promotion Plan that we provide covers a variety of different services. You have the option of either choosing the whole plan or customizing it by selecting and combining one or more of the services that we provide. The following is a list of the services that we provide for the marketing and promotion of books.

Book Reviews

Book Reviews have direct impact on readers while they are choosing their next book to read. When they are purchasing book, most readers prefer the books with good reviews. We’ll review your book and post reviews on Amazon, Flipkart, Goodreads and on our Blogs and social-media channels.

Author Interviews

We’ll interview the author and post those questions and answers on blogs and social medias so that readers get to know about author and his book. This will make author famous along with his book among the reading community.

Social Media Promotion

We have more than 170K followers on our social media channels who are interested in books and reading. We’ll create and publish different posts about book and author on our social media platforms.

Social Media Set up

Social Media is a significant tool to reaching out your readers and make them aware of your work. We’ll help you to setup and manage various social media profiles and fan pages for your book.

We’ll provide you our social media marketing guide, using which you may take advantage of these social media platforms to create and engage your fan base.

Website Creation

One of the most effective and long-term strategies to increase your book sales is to create your own website. Author website is must have tool for authors today and it doesn’t just help you to promote book but also helps you to engage with your potential readers. Our full featured author website, with blog, social media integration and other cool features, is the best marketing tool you can have. You can list each of your titles and link them to buy from various online stores.

Google / Facebook / Youtube Adverts

We can help you in creating ad on Google, Facebook and Youtube to reach your target audience using specific keywords and categories relevant to your book.

With our help you can narrow down your ads to the exact target audience for your book.

For more details mail us at [email protected]

The Bookish Elf is your single, trusted, daily source for all the news, ideas and richness of literary life. The Bookish Elf is a site you can rely on for book reviews, author interviews, book recommendations, and all things books. Contact us: [email protected]

Quick Links

1.1 Reading and Writing in College

Learning objectives.

Understand the expectations for reading and writing assignments in college courses.
Understand and apply general strategies to complete college-level reading assignments efficiently and effectively.
Recognize specific types of writing assignments frequently included in college courses.
Understand and apply general strategies for managing college-level writing assignments.
Determine specific reading and writing strategies that work best for you individually.

As you begin this chapter, you may be wondering why you need an introduction. After all, you have been writing and reading since elementary school. You completed numerous assessments of your reading and writing skills in high school and as part of your application process for college. You may write on the job, too. Why is a college writing course even necessary?

When you are eager to get started on the coursework in your major that will prepare you for your career, getting excited about an introductory college writing course can be difficult. However, regardless of your field of study, honing your writing skills—and your reading and critical-thinking skills—gives you a more solid academic foundation.

In college, academic expectations change from what you may have experienced in high school. The quantity of work you are expected to do is increased. When instructors expect you to read pages upon pages or study hours and hours for one particular course, managing your work load can be challenging. This chapter includes strategies for studying efficiently and managing your time.

The quality of the work you do also changes. It is not enough to understand course material and summarize it on an exam. You will also be expected to seriously engage with new ideas by reflecting on them, analyzing them, critiquing them, making connections, drawing conclusions, or finding new ways of thinking about a given subject. Educationally, you are moving into deeper waters. A good introductory writing course will help you swim.

Table 1.1 “High School versus College Assignments” summarizes some of the other major differences between high school and college assignments.

Table 1.1 High School versus College Assignments

This chapter covers the types of reading and writing assignments you will encounter as a college student. You will also learn a variety of strategies for mastering these new challenges—and becoming a more confident student and writer.

Throughout this chapter, you will follow a first-year student named Crystal. After several years of working as a saleswoman in a department store, Crystal has decided to pursue a degree in elementary education and become a teacher. She is continuing to work part-time, and occasionally she finds it challenging to balance the demands of work, school, and caring for her four-year-old son. As you read about Crystal, think about how you can use her experience to get the most out of your own college experience.

Review Table 1.1 “High School versus College Assignments” and think about how you have found your college experience to be different from high school so far. Respond to the following questions:

In what ways do you think college will be more rewarding for you as a learner?
What aspects of college do you expect to find most challenging?
What changes do you think you might have to make in your life to ensure your success in college?

Reading Strategies

Your college courses will sharpen both your reading and your writing skills. Most of your writing assignments—from brief response papers to in-depth research projects—will depend on your understanding of course reading assignments or related readings you do on your own. And it is difficult, if not impossible, to write effectively about a text that you have not understood. Even when you do understand the reading, it can be hard to write about it if you do not feel personally engaged with the ideas discussed.

This section discusses strategies you can use to get the most out of your college reading assignments. These strategies fall into three broad categories:

Planning strategies. To help you manage your reading assignments.
Comprehension strategies. To help you understand the material.
Active reading strategies. To take your understanding to a higher and deeper level.

Planning Your Reading

Have you ever stayed up all night cramming just before an exam? Or found yourself skimming a detailed memo from your boss five minutes before a crucial meeting? The first step in handling college reading successfully is planning. This involves both managing your time and setting a clear purpose for your reading.

Managing Your Reading Time

You will learn more detailed strategies for time management in Section 1.2 “Developing Study Skills” , but for now, focus on setting aside enough time for reading and breaking your assignments into manageable chunks. If you are assigned a seventy-page chapter to read for next week’s class, try not to wait until the night before to get started. Give yourself at least a few days and tackle one section at a time.

Your method for breaking up the assignment will depend on the type of reading. If the text is very dense and packed with unfamiliar terms and concepts, you may need to read no more than five or ten pages in one sitting so that you can truly understand and process the information. With more user-friendly texts, you will be able to handle longer sections—twenty to forty pages, for instance. And if you have a highly engaging reading assignment, such as a novel you cannot put down, you may be able to read lengthy passages in one sitting.

As the semester progresses, you will develop a better sense of how much time you need to allow for the reading assignments in different subjects. It also makes sense to preview each assignment well in advance to assess its difficulty level and to determine how much reading time to set aside.

College instructors often set aside reserve readings for a particular course. These consist of articles, book chapters, or other texts that are not part of the primary course textbook. Copies of reserve readings are available through the university library; in print; or, more often, online. When you are assigned a reserve reading, download it ahead of time (and let your instructor know if you have trouble accessing it). Skim through it to get a rough idea of how much time you will need to read the assignment in full.

Setting a Purpose

The other key component of planning is setting a purpose. Knowing what you want to get out of a reading assignment helps you determine how to approach it and how much time to spend on it. It also helps you stay focused during those occasional moments when it is late, you are tired, and relaxing in front of the television sounds far more appealing than curling up with a stack of journal articles.

Sometimes your purpose is simple. You might just need to understand the reading material well enough to discuss it intelligently in class the next day. However, your purpose will often go beyond that. For instance, you might also read to compare two texts, to formulate a personal response to a text, or to gather ideas for future research. Here are some questions to ask to help determine your purpose:

How did my instructor frame the assignment? Often your instructors will tell you what they expect you to get out of the reading:

Read Chapter 2 and come to class prepared to discuss current teaching practices in elementary math.
Read these two articles and compare Smith’s and Jones’s perspectives on the 2010 health care reform bill.
Read Chapter 5 and think about how you could apply these guidelines to running your own business.
How deeply do I need to understand the reading? If you are majoring in computer science and you are assigned to read Chapter 1, “Introduction to Computer Science,” it is safe to assume the chapter presents fundamental concepts that you will be expected to master. However, for some reading assignments, you may be expected to form a general understanding but not necessarily master the content. Again, pay attention to how your instructor presents the assignment.
How does this assignment relate to other course readings or to concepts discussed in class? Your instructor may make some of these connections explicitly, but if not, try to draw connections on your own. (Needless to say, it helps to take detailed notes both when in class and when you read.)
How might I use this text again in the future? If you are assigned to read about a topic that has always interested you, your reading assignment might help you develop ideas for a future research paper. Some reading assignments provide valuable tips or summaries worth bookmarking for future reference. Think about what you can take from the reading that will stay with you.

Improving Your Comprehension

You have blocked out time for your reading assignments and set a purpose for reading. Now comes the challenge: making sure you actually understand all the information you are expected to process. Some of your reading assignments will be fairly straightforward. Others, however, will be longer or more complex, so you will need a plan for how to handle them.

For any expository writing —that is, nonfiction, informational writing—your first comprehension goal is to identify the main points and relate any details to those main points. Because college-level texts can be challenging, you will also need to monitor your reading comprehension. That is, you will need to stop periodically and assess how well you understand what you are reading. Finally, you can improve comprehension by taking time to determine which strategies work best for you and putting those strategies into practice.

Identifying the Main Points

In college, you will read a wide variety of materials, including the following:

Textbooks. These usually include summaries, glossaries, comprehension questions, and other study aids.
Nonfiction trade books. These are less likely to include the study features found in textbooks.
Popular magazine, newspaper, or web articles. These are usually written for a general audience.
Scholarly books and journal articles. These are written for an audience of specialists in a given field.

Regardless of what type of expository text you are assigned to read, your primary comprehension goal is to identify the main point : the most important idea that the writer wants to communicate and often states early on. Finding the main point gives you a framework to organize the details presented in the reading and relate the reading to concepts you learned in class or through other reading assignments. After identifying the main point, you will find the supporting points , the details, facts, and explanations that develop and clarify the main point.

Some texts make that task relatively easy. Textbooks, for instance, include the aforementioned features as well as headings and subheadings intended to make it easier for students to identify core concepts. Graphic features, such as sidebars, diagrams, and charts, help students understand complex information and distinguish between essential and inessential points. When you are assigned to read from a textbook, be sure to use available comprehension aids to help you identify the main points.

Trade books and popular articles may not be written specifically for an educational purpose; nevertheless, they also include features that can help you identify the main ideas. These features include the following:

Trade books. Many trade books include an introduction that presents the writer’s main ideas and purpose for writing. Reading chapter titles (and any subtitles within the chapter) will help you get a broad sense of what is covered. It also helps to read the beginning and ending paragraphs of a chapter closely. These paragraphs often sum up the main ideas presented.
Popular articles. Reading the headings and introductory paragraphs carefully is crucial. In magazine articles, these features (along with the closing paragraphs) present the main concepts. Hard news articles in newspapers present the gist of the news story in the lead paragraph, while subsequent paragraphs present increasingly general details.

At the far end of the reading difficulty scale are scholarly books and journal articles. Because these texts are written for a specialized, highly educated audience, the authors presume their readers are already familiar with the topic. The language and writing style is sophisticated and sometimes dense.

When you read scholarly books and journal articles, try to apply the same strategies discussed earlier. The introduction usually presents the writer’s thesis , the idea or hypothesis the writer is trying to prove. Headings and subheadings can help you understand how the writer has organized support for his or her thesis. Additionally, academic journal articles often include a summary at the beginning, called an abstract, and electronic databases include summaries of articles, too.

For more information about reading different types of texts, see Chapter 12 “Writing a Research Paper” .

Monitoring Your Comprehension

Finding the main idea and paying attention to text features as you read helps you figure out what you should know. Just as important, however, is being able to figure out what you do not know and developing a strategy to deal with it.

Textbooks often include comprehension questions in the margins or at the end of a section or chapter. As you read, stop occasionally to answer these questions on paper or in your head. Use them to identify sections you may need to reread, read more carefully, or ask your instructor about later.

Even when a text does not have built-in comprehension features, you can actively monitor your own comprehension. Try these strategies, adapting them as needed to suit different kinds of texts:

Summarize. At the end of each section, pause to summarize the main points in a few sentences. If you have trouble doing so, revisit that section.
Ask and answer questions. When you begin reading a section, try to identify two to three questions you should be able to answer after you finish it. Write down your questions and use them to test yourself on the reading. If you cannot answer a question, try to determine why. Is the answer buried in that section of reading but just not coming across to you? Or do you expect to find the answer in another part of the reading?
Do not read in a vacuum. Look for opportunities to discuss the reading with your classmates. Many instructors set up online discussion forums or blogs specifically for that purpose. Participating in these discussions can help you determine whether your understanding of the main points is the same as your peers’.

These discussions can also serve as a reality check. If everyone in the class struggled with the reading, it may be exceptionally challenging. If it was a breeze for everyone but you, you may need to see your instructor for help.

As a working mother, Crystal found that the best time to get her reading done was in the evening, after she had put her four-year-old to bed. However, she occasionally had trouble concentrating at the end of a long day. She found that by actively working to summarize the reading and asking and answering questions, she focused better and retained more of what she read. She also found that evenings were a good time to check the class discussion forums that a few of her instructors had created.

Choose any text that that you have been assigned to read for one of your college courses. In your notes, complete the following tasks:

Summarize the main points of the text in two to three sentences.
Write down two to three questions about the text that you can bring up during class discussion.

Students are often reluctant to seek help. They feel like doing so marks them as slow, weak, or demanding. The truth is, every learner occasionally struggles. If you are sincerely trying to keep up with the course reading but feel like you are in over your head, seek out help. Speak up in class, schedule a meeting with your instructor, or visit your university learning center for assistance.

Deal with the problem as early in the semester as you can. Instructors respect students who are proactive about their own learning. Most instructors will work hard to help students who make the effort to help themselves.

Taking It to the Next Level: Active Reading

Now that you have acquainted (or reacquainted) yourself with useful planning and comprehension strategies, college reading assignments may feel more manageable. You know what you need to do to get your reading done and make sure you grasp the main points. However, the most successful students in college are not only competent readers but active, engaged readers.

Using the SQ3R Strategy

One strategy you can use to become a more active, engaged reader is the SQ3R strategy , a step-by-step process to follow before, during, and after reading. You may already use some variation of it. In essence, the process works like this:

Survey the text in advance.
Form questions before you start reading.
Read the text.
Recite and/or record important points during and after reading.
Review and reflect on the text after you read.

Before you read, you survey, or preview, the text. As noted earlier, reading introductory paragraphs and headings can help you begin to figure out the author’s main point and identify what important topics will be covered. However, surveying does not stop there. Look over sidebars, photographs, and any other text or graphic features that catch your eye. Skim a few paragraphs. Preview any boldfaced or italicized vocabulary terms. This will help you form a first impression of the material.

Next, start brainstorming questions about the text. What do you expect to learn from the reading? You may find that some questions come to mind immediately based on your initial survey or based on previous readings and class discussions. If not, try using headings and subheadings in the text to formulate questions. For instance, if one heading in your textbook reads “Medicare and Medicaid,” you might ask yourself these questions:

When was Medicare and Medicaid legislation enacted? Why?
What are the major differences between these two programs?

Although some of your questions may be simple factual questions, try to come up with a few that are more open-ended. Asking in-depth questions will help you stay more engaged as you read.

The next step is simple: read. As you read, notice whether your first impressions of the text were correct. Are the author’s main points and overall approach about the same as what you predicted—or does the text contain a few surprises? Also, look for answers to your earlier questions and begin forming new questions. Continue to revise your impressions and questions as you read.

While you are reading, pause occasionally to recite or record important points. It is best to do this at the end of each section or when there is an obvious shift in the writer’s train of thought. Put the book aside for a moment and recite aloud the main points of the section or any important answers you found there. You might also record ideas by jotting down a few brief notes in addition to, or instead of, reciting aloud. Either way, the physical act of articulating information makes you more likely to remember it.

After you have completed the reading, take some time to review the material more thoroughly. If the textbook includes review questions or your instructor has provided a study guide, use these tools to guide your review. You will want to record information in a more detailed format than you used during reading, such as in an outline or a list.

As you review the material, reflect on what you learned. Did anything surprise you, upset you, or make you think? Did you find yourself strongly agreeing or disagreeing with any points in the text? What topics would you like to explore further? Jot down your reflections in your notes. (Instructors sometimes require students to write brief response papers or maintain a reading journal. Use these assignments to help you reflect on what you read.)

Choose another text that that you have been assigned to read for a class. Use the SQ3R process to complete the reading. (Keep in mind that you may need to spread the reading over more than one session, especially if the text is long.)

Be sure to complete all the steps involved. Then, reflect on how helpful you found this process. On a scale of one to ten, how useful did you find it? How does it compare with other study techniques you have used?

Using Other Active Reading Strategies

The SQ3R process encompasses a number of valuable active reading strategies: previewing a text, making predictions, asking and answering questions, and summarizing. You can use the following additional strategies to further deepen your understanding of what you read.

Connect what you read to what you already know. Look for ways the reading supports, extends, or challenges concepts you have learned elsewhere.
Relate the reading to your own life. What statements, people, or situations relate to your personal experiences?
Visualize. For both fiction and nonfiction texts, try to picture what is described. Visualizing is especially helpful when you are reading a narrative text, such as a novel or a historical account, or when you read expository text that describes a process, such as how to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).
Pay attention to graphics as well as text. Photographs, diagrams, flow charts, tables, and other graphics can help make abstract ideas more concrete and understandable.
Understand the text in context. Understanding context means thinking about who wrote the text, when and where it was written, the author’s purpose for writing it, and what assumptions or agendas influenced the author’s ideas. For instance, two writers might both address the subject of health care reform, but if one article is an opinion piece and one is a news story, the context is different.
Plan to talk or write about what you read. Jot down a few questions or comments in your notebook so you can bring them up in class. (This also gives you a source of topic ideas for papers and presentations later in the semester.) Discuss the reading on a class discussion board or blog about it.

As Crystal began her first semester of elementary education courses, she occasionally felt lost in a sea of new terms and theories about teaching and child development. She found that it helped to relate the reading to her personal observations of her son and other kids she knew.

Writing at Work

Many college courses require students to participate in interactive online components, such as a discussion forum, a page on a social networking site, or a class blog. These tools are a great way to reinforce learning. Do not be afraid to be the student who starts the discussion.

Remember that when you interact with other students and teachers online, you need to project a mature, professional image. You may be able to use an informal, conversational tone, but complaining about the work load, using off-color language, or “flaming” other participants is inappropriate.

Active reading can benefit you in ways that go beyond just earning good grades. By practicing these strategies, you will find yourself more interested in your courses and better able to relate your academic work to the rest of your life. Being an interested, engaged student also helps you form lasting connections with your instructors and with other students that can be personally and professionally valuable. In short, it helps you get the most out of your education.

Common Writing Assignments

College writing assignments serve a different purpose than the typical writing assignments you completed in high school. In high school, teachers generally focus on teaching you to write in a variety of modes and formats, including personal writing, expository writing, research papers, creative writing, and writing short answers and essays for exams. Over time, these assignments help you build a foundation of writing skills.

In college, many instructors will expect you to already have that foundation.

Your college composition courses will focus on writing for its own sake, helping you make the transition to college-level writing assignments. However, in most other college courses, writing assignments serve a different purpose. In those courses, you may use writing as one tool among many for learning how to think about a particular academic discipline.

Additionally, certain assignments teach you how to meet the expectations for professional writing in a given field. Depending on the class, you might be asked to write a lab report, a case study, a literary analysis, a business plan, or an account of a personal interview. You will need to learn and follow the standard conventions for those types of written products.

Finally, personal and creative writing assignments are less common in college than in high school. College courses emphasize expository writing, writing that explains or informs. Often expository writing assignments will incorporate outside research, too. Some classes will also require persuasive writing assignments in which you state and support your position on an issue. College instructors will hold you to a higher standard when it comes to supporting your ideas with reasons and evidence.

Table 1.2 “Common Types of College Writing Assignments” lists some of the most common types of college writing assignments. It includes minor, less formal assignments as well as major ones. Which specific assignments you encounter will depend on the courses you take and the learning objectives developed by your instructors.

Table 1.2 Common Types of College Writing Assignments

Part of managing your education is communicating well with others at your university. For instance, you might need to e-mail your instructor to request an office appointment or explain why you will need to miss a class. You might need to contact administrators with questions about your tuition or financial aid. Later, you might ask instructors to write recommendations on your behalf.

Treat these documents as professional communications. Address the recipient politely; state your question, problem, or request clearly; and use a formal, respectful tone. Doing so helps you make a positive impression and get a quicker response.

Key Takeaways

College-level reading and writing assignments differ from high school assignments not only in quantity but also in quality.
Managing college reading assignments successfully requires you to plan and manage your time, set a purpose for reading, practice effective comprehension strategies, and use active reading strategies to deepen your understanding of the text.
College writing assignments place greater emphasis on learning to think critically about a particular discipline and less emphasis on personal and creative writing.

Reading is Good Habit for Students and Children

500+ words essay on reading is good habit.

Reading is a very good habit that one needs to develop in life. Good books can inform you, enlighten you and lead you in the right direction. There is no better companion than a good book. Reading is important because it is good for your overall well-being. Once you start reading, you experience a whole new world. When you start loving the habit of reading you eventually get addicted to it. Reading develops language skills and vocabulary. Reading books is also a way to relax and reduce stress. It is important to read a good book at least for a few minutes each day to stretch the brain muscles for healthy functioning.

Benefits of Reading

Books really are your best friends as you can rely on them when you are bored, upset, depressed, lonely or annoyed. They will accompany you anytime you want them and enhance your mood. They share with you information and knowledge any time you need. Good books always guide you to the correct path in life. Following are the benefits of reading –

Self Improvement: Reading helps you develop positive thinking. Reading is important because it develops your mind and gives you excessive knowledge and lessons of life. It helps you understand the world around you better. It keeps your mind active and enhances your creative ability.

Communication Skills: Reading improves your vocabulary and develops your communication skills. It helps you learn how to use your language creatively. Not only does it improve your communication but it also makes you a better writer. Good communication is important in every aspect of life.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Increases Knowledge: Books enable you to have a glimpse into cultures, traditions, arts, history, geography, health, psychology and several other subjects and aspects of life. You get an amazing amount of knowledge and information from books.

Reduces Stress: Reading a good book takes you in a new world and helps you relieve your day to day stress. It has several positive effects on your mind, body, and soul. It stimulates your brain muscles and keeps your brain healthy and strong.

Great Pleasure: When I read a book, I read it for pleasure. I just indulge myself in reading and experience a whole new world. Once I start reading a book I get so captivated I never want to leave it until I finish. It always gives a lot of pleasure to read a good book and cherish it for a lifetime.

Boosts your Imagination and Creativity: Reading takes you to the world of imagination and enhances your creativity. Reading helps you explore life from different perspectives. While you read books you are building new and creative thoughts, images and opinions in your mind. It makes you think creatively, fantasize and use your imagination.

Develops your Analytical Skills: By active reading, you explore several aspects of life. It involves questioning what you read. It helps you develop your thoughts and express your opinions. New ideas and thoughts pop up in your mind by active reading. It stimulates and develops your brain and gives you a new perspective.

Reduces Boredom: Journeys for long hours or a long vacation from work can be pretty boring in spite of all the social sites. Books come in handy and release you from boredom.

Read Different Stages of Reading here.

The habit of reading is one of the best qualities that a person can possess. Books are known to be your best friend for a reason. So it is very important to develop a good reading habit. We must all read on a daily basis for at least 30 minutes to enjoy the sweet fruits of reading. It is a great pleasure to sit in a quiet place and enjoy reading. Reading a good book is the most enjoyable experience one can have.

Customize your course in 30 seconds

Which class are you in.

Travelling Essay
Picnic Essay
Our Country Essay
My Parents Essay
Essay on Favourite Personality
Essay on Memorable Day of My Life
Essay on Knowledge is Power
Essay on Gurpurab
Essay on My Favourite Season
Essay on Types of Sports

Download the App

10 Benefits of Reading: Why You Should Read Every Day

The following article with the title above is from Lana Winter-Hébert, writing for lifehack.org:

When was the last time you read a book, or a substantial magazine article? Do your daily reading habits center around tweets, Facebook updates, or the directions on your instant oatmeal packet? If you’re one of countless people who don’t make a habit of reading regularly, you might be missing out: reading has a significant number of benefits, and just a few benefits of reading are listed below.

2. Stress Reduction : No matter how much stress you have at work, in your personal relationships, or countless other issues faced in daily life, it all just slips away when you lose yourself in a great story. A well-written novel can transport you to other realms, while an engaging article will distract you and keep you in the present moment, letting tensions drain away and allowing you to relax.

3. Knowledge: Everything you read fills your head with new bits of information, and you never know when it might come in handy. The more knowledge you have, the better-equipped you are to tackle any challenge you’ll ever face. Additionally, here’s a bit of food for thought: should you ever find yourself in dire circumstances, remember that although you might lose everything else—your job, your possessions, your money, even your health—knowledge can never be taken from you.

4. Vocabulary Expansion: This goes with the above topic: the more you read, the more words you gain exposure to, and they’ll inevitably make their way into your everyday vocabulary. Being articulate and well-spoken is of great help in any profession, and knowing that you can speak to higher-ups with self-confidence can be an enormous boost to your self-esteem. It could even aid in your career, as those who are well-read, well-spoken, and knowledgeable on a variety of topics tend to get promotions more quickly (and more often) than those with smaller vocabularies and lack of awareness of literature, scientific breakthroughs, and global events. Reading books is also vital for learning new languages, as non-native speakers gain exposure to words used in context, which will ameliorate their own speaking and writing fluency.

5. Memory Improvement: When you read a book, you have to remember an assortment of characters, their backgrounds, ambitions, history, and nuances, as well as the various arcs and sub-plots that weave their way through every story. That’s a fair bit to remember, but brains are marvellous things and can remember these things with relative ease. Amazingly enough, every new memory you create forges new synapses (brain pathways)and strengthens existing ones, which assists in short-term memory recall as well as stabilizing moods. How cool is that?

6. Stronger Analytical Thinking Skills: Have you ever read an amazing mystery novel, and solved the mystery yourself before finishing the book? If so, you were able to put critical and analytical thinking to work by taking note of all the details provided and sorting them out to determine “whodunnit”. That same ability to analyze details also comes in handy when it comes to critiquing the plot; determining whether it was a well-written piece, if the characters were properly developed, if the storyline ran smoothly, etc. Should you ever have an opportunity to discuss the book with others, you’ll be able to state your opinions clearly, as you’ve taken the time to really consider all the aspects involved.

8. Better Writing Skills : This goes hand-in-hand with the expansion of your vocabulary: exposure to published, well-written work has a noted effect on one’s own writing, as observing the cadence, fluidity, and writing styles of other authors will invariably influence your own work. In the same way that musicians influence one another, and painters use techniques established by previous masters, so do writers learn how to craft prose by reading the works of others.

9. Tranquility: In addition to the relaxation that accompanies reading a good book, it’s possible that the subject you read about can bring about immense inner peace and tranquility. Reading spiritual texts can lower blood pressure and bring about an immense sense of calm, while reading self-help books has been shown to help people suffering from certain mood disorders and mild mental illnesses.

10. Free Entertainment: Though many of us like to buy books so we can annotate them and dog-ear pages for future reference, they can be quite pricey. For low-budget entertainment, you can visit your local library and bask in the glory of the countless tomes available there for free. Libraries have books on every subject imaginable, and since they rotate their stock and constantly get new books, you’ll never run out of reading materials. If you happen to live in an area that doesn’t have a local library, or if you’re mobility-impaired and can’t get to one easily, most libraries have their books available in PDF or ePub format so you can read them on your e-reader, iPad, or your computer screen. There are also many sources online where you can download free e-books, so go hunting for something new to read! There’s a reading genre for every literate person on the planet, and whether your tastes lie in classical literature, poetry, fashion magazines, biographies, religious texts, young adult books, self-help guides, street lit, or romance novels, there’s something out there to capture your curiosity and imagination. Step away from your computer for a little while, crack open a book, and replenish your soul for a little while.

Image 1 for article titled "10 Benefits of Reading: Why You Should Read Every Day"

What is academic writing and why is it important?

Dec 27, 2020 | Academic Writing , College Applications , Englist blog , TOEFL Prep | 0 comments

Academic writing has become an increasingly important part of education as parents and educators realize the value of critical thinking skills and preparing students for college.

Still, many students, parents, and even other teachers don’t have a great grasp on this area of learning and why it is so critical.

As such, at Englist we find it is important to not only teach academic writing, but also help everyone understand why it is imperative to the development of thoughtful and capable students.

What is academic writing?

First, what is academic writing? Most students see writing as something they just have to do because a teacher says so, and it becomes a painful and time-consuming assignment. Our mission is to end this kind of thinking.

Simply put, academic writing is teaching students how to write essays. That sounds pretty simple, but there is a lot more to it than that.

Essay writing is the process of sharing complex ideas, thoughts, or opinions. Writers learn to construct a rather complicated argument or explanation by combining sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into an essay.

Academic writing demands writers become clear in their explanations and reasoning, direct in their communication, and most importantly, able to make readers understand their topic and thesis.

Overcoming Praxis Test Challenges: Retaking and Succeeding

By Praxis Editorial Team

Published on May 7, 2024

Two people - a man and a woman - sit at a desk together in front of an open laptop comupter. To the left of them: a sign reading "ETS Praxis and Study.com"

Future Directions: How Praxis and Study.com Consider Educator Preparation and Support

Published on April 30, 2024

Unveiling Educational Impact: ETS Praxis Ventures into New Research Horizons

Published on April 23, 2024

At the top of the image, there reads the following: ETS Praxis and Study.com. In the middle of the page, there is a hexagon with Study.com Free Praxis Core Prep typed inside of it.

Achieving Success: Our Innovative Test Prep for Praxis Core

Published on April 15, 2024

Unlocking Diversity: ETS and Study.com Research Explores Keys to the Classroom

Published on April 9, 2024

A young girl wearing headphones sits at a desk. She looks at a laptop - on its screen is an image of a teacher writing A, B, C - and then takes notes on a pad of paper.

Enhancing Literacy Learning: Blending Technology and Education

Published on April 2, 2024

A teacher job candidate shakes the hand of her interviewer during a job interview.

Get Your Dream Job: Top 10 Interview Questions

Published on March 25, 2024

Five people sit in chairs next to each other as they wait to be interviewed for a teaching job.

Making the Grade: Finding Your Ideal First Teaching Job

Published on February 27, 2024

A clock that reads 11:57 has an exaggerated alarm that resembles blue and white lines coming out of its right side.

Assessment Strategies I Wish I Knew When I Started Teaching

Published on March 12, 2024

Five educators work together on a computer exercise as they participate in professional development.

Empowering New Teachers with Professional Development

Published on March 5, 2024

A young girl sits at a desk and plays with blocks. She sits next to a girl in a yellow shirt who is drawing with markers.

Supercharging Education with Formative Learning

Published on March 19, 2024

The word "Praxis" is superimposed on top of an image of a teacher working with two children. One child works at a table next to the teacher; the other child smiles and looks at us, the audience.

Meet Praxis: Where Education Leads the Conversation

Published on February 20, 2024

Breaking Boundaries: Praxis and Study.com Partner to Empower Educators

Learn how study.com can lead you to praxis success..

The Lifelong Benefits of Reading: How Books Can Transform Your Life

Discover the transformative power of books and unlock a world of lifelong benefits through reading.

In today’s fast-paced digital age, where information is readily available at our fingertips, it’s easy to overlook the profound impact that reading can have on our lives. But beneath the surface lies a treasure trove of wisdom, knowledge, and personal growth waiting to be unraveled.

From broadening our horizons and enhancing our empathy to improving our cognitive abilities and reducing stress, books have the remarkable ability to shape and transform us. In this article, we will delve into the countless ways in which reading can enrich our lives, offering a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

So, grab a cup of tea, find a cozy nook, and embark on a journey that will leave you with a newfound appreciation for the power of the written word. Whether you’re a devoted bookworm or someone who has yet to discover the joys of reading, prepare to be inspired by the lifelong benefits that await you on this literary adventure.

The Power of Reading

Reading is more than just a pleasurable pastime; it is a gateway to personal growth and transformation. When we dive into a compelling story or immerse ourselves in a thought-provoking non-fiction book, we open ourselves up to new ideas and perspectives. Books have the power to challenge our preconceived notions and expand our understanding of the world.

Reading also enhances our cognitive abilities. It improves our vocabulary, comprehension, and critical thinking skills. As we engage with the written word, our brains are stimulated, creating new neural connections and improving our overall mental agility.

But reading is not just about intellectual growth. It has a profound impact on our emotional well-being as well. Whether it’s losing ourselves in a fictional world or finding solace in a self-help book, reading provides an escape from the pressures of everyday life. It allows us to explore our own emotions and connect with the experiences of others, fostering empathy and compassion.

Mental Benefits of Reading

The mental benefits of reading are manifold. Research has shown that reading regularly can improve our memory and concentration. When we read, we are required to focus our attention and retain information, exercising our brain in the process. This mental workout not only improves our ability to recall information but also enhances our concentration and attention span in other areas of life.

Furthermore, reading has been linked to a reduced risk of cognitive decline and dementia. By regularly engaging our brains through reading, we can help keep our minds sharp and agile as we age. It’s like a workout for the brain, keeping it in top shape and staving off the effects of aging.

In addition to improving memory and cognitive function, reading can also enhance our problem-solving skills. As we encounter different scenarios and challenges in books, we are exposed to various ways of thinking and problem-solving. This exposure broadens our mental toolkit, allowing us to approach real-life problems with a fresh perspective and a wider range of strategies.

Emotional Benefits of Reading

Reading has a profound impact on our emotional well-being. It provides an escape from the stresses of everyday life, allowing us to immerse ourselves in different worlds and experiences. Whether we’re laughing out loud at a humorous novel or shedding tears over a heart-wrenching story, books evoke a wide range of emotions that allow us to connect with our own feelings.

Moreover, reading can increase our empathy and understanding of others. When we read about characters from different backgrounds or with different perspectives, we gain insight into their lives and experiences. This exposure to diverse narratives helps us develop a broader worldview and fosters empathy towards others, ultimately making us more compassionate individuals.

Reading can also be therapeutic. It can provide solace during difficult times and offer a sense of comfort and understanding when we feel alone. Books have the power to validate our emotions and provide us with the tools to navigate challenging situations. They can serve as a form of self-help, guiding us towards personal growth and healing.

Physical Benefits of Reading

While reading is often associated with mental and emotional benefits, it also has positive effects on our physical well-being. One of the most notable physical benefits is stress reduction. Reading has been shown to lower heart rate and reduce stress levels, promoting a sense of calm and relaxation. By immersing ourselves in a good book, we can escape from the demands of daily life and find respite from the pressures that weigh us down.

Furthermore, reading can improve sleep quality. Engaging in a quiet activity like reading before bed can help signal to our bodies that it’s time to wind down and prepare for sleep. By creating a bedtime routine that includes reading, we can promote better sleep hygiene and ensure a more restful night’s sleep.

Additionally, reading can have a positive impact on our overall brain health. Studies have shown that reading can improve brain connectivity and increase neural activity. This stimulation of the brain can help ward off cognitive decline and improve cognitive function, leading to better overall brain health.

Social Benefits of Reading

Reading is often seen as a solitary activity, but it can also have social benefits. When we read a book, it opens up opportunities for conversation and connection with others. Book clubs, discussion groups, and literary events provide spaces for like-minded individuals to come together and share their thoughts and experiences.

Reading can also foster a sense of community. When we engage with a popular book or series, we become part of a larger cultural conversation. We can connect with others who have shared similar reading experiences and engage in discussions about the themes and ideas presented in the books. This shared connection can create a sense of belonging and camaraderie.

Furthermore, reading can improve our communication skills. As we encounter different writing styles and perspectives in books, we develop a greater appreciation for language and storytelling. This exposure to diverse narratives can enhance our own writing and communication abilities, allowing us to express ourselves more effectively and connect with others on a deeper level.

The Impact of Reading on Personal Growth and Development

Reading is a powerful tool for personal growth and development. It provides us with a wealth of knowledge and insights that can help us navigate the complexities of life. Whether we’re seeking advice on relationships , career guidance, or personal development, books offer a vast array of resources and perspectives to draw from.

One of the key ways in which reading promotes personal growth is by expanding our knowledge and perspective. By exposing ourselves to different ideas, cultures, and experiences through books, we broaden our understanding of the world and challenge our own beliefs and assumptions. This expansion of knowledge can lead to personal transformation and a greater sense of empathy and understanding towards others.

Furthermore, reading enhances our creativity and imagination. When we read, we are transported to different worlds and introduced to unique characters and situations. This exposure to new ideas and perspectives stimulates our own creativity and imagination, allowing us to think outside the box and approach problems with a fresh perspective.

Reading also offers us the opportunity for introspection and self-reflection. Through the experiences of characters in books, we can gain insight into our own emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. This self-awareness can lead to personal growth and self-improvement as we identify areas for development and work towards becoming the best version of ourselves.

How Reading Can Improve Creativity and Imagination

Reading is a wellspring of inspiration for creativity and imagination. When we engage with books, we are exposed to different writing styles, storytelling techniques, and imaginative worlds. This exposure helps us think creatively and generate new ideas in various aspects of our lives.

By immersing ourselves in the worlds created by authors, we can expand our own imagination. Books allow us to visualize characters, settings, and events, fostering our ability to create vivid mental images. This enhanced imagination can be beneficial in many areas, such as problem-solving, brainstorming, and artistic endeavors.

Moreover, reading exposes us to different perspectives and ways of thinking, which can fuel our creative thinking. By encountering diverse narratives and exploring different points of view, we challenge our own assumptions and expand our thinking beyond conventional boundaries. This exposure to new ideas can inspire us to approach problems and projects in innovative ways.

Reading can also help us develop our own writing and storytelling skills. As we engage with well-crafted narratives, we subconsciously absorb writing techniques and storytelling structures. This exposure to quality writing can enhance our own writing abilities, allowing us to communicate more effectively and captivate our audience.

Reading as a Form of Relaxation and Stress Relief

In our fast-paced and digitally connected world, finding moments of relaxation and calm can be challenging. Reading offers a respite from the demands of daily life and provides a much-needed escape from the constant stream of information and stimuli.

When we immerse ourselves in a good book, our minds are transported to a different world. The act of reading requires focus and concentration, allowing us to temporarily disconnect from our worries and concerns. This focused immersion in a captivating story or subject matter helps us relax and unwind, promoting a sense of calm and tranquility.

Moreover, reading has been shown to lower heart rate and reduce stress levels. The rhythmic nature of reading, combined with the engagement of the mind, creates a soothing effect on the body. As we become absorbed in a book, our breathing slows, and our heart rate decreases, promoting a state of relaxation and stress relief.

Additionally, reading before bed can improve sleep quality. Engaging in a quiet and calming activity like reading helps signal to our bodies that it’s time to wind down and prepare for sleep. By incorporating reading into our bedtime routine, we can promote better sleep hygiene and ensure a more restful night’s sleep.

How to Develop a Reading Habit

Developing a reading habit is a journey that requires commitment and intention. Here are some tips to help you cultivate a love for reading and make it a regular part of your life:

Set aside dedicated time for reading: Carve out specific time slots in your day for reading. It could be a few minutes in the morning, during your lunch break, or before bed. Consistency is key, so aim to read at the same time each day.
Create a cozy reading environment: Find a comfortable spot in your home where you can relax and focus on your reading. Set the mood with soft lighting, a cozy blanket, and a cup of tea or coffee.
Start with books that interest you: Choose books that align with your interests and passions. If you’re not sure where to start, ask for recommendations from friends, join a book club, or explore different genres to discover what resonates with you.
Set realistic reading goals: Set achievable reading goals for yourself, such as reading a certain number of pages or chapters each day. This will help you stay motivated and track your progress.
Limit distractions: Minimize distractions during your reading time by turning off your phone or putting it on silent mode. Create a quiet and focused environment that allows you to fully immerse yourself in the book.
Join a reading community: Engage with others who share your love for reading by joining online book clubs or discussion groups. This will provide opportunities for meaningful conversations and recommendations for new books to explore.
Keep a reading journal: Record your thoughts, reflections, and favorite quotes in a reading journal. This can enhance your reading experience and serve as a valuable resource for future reference. Remember, developing a reading habit takes time and patience. Be gentle with yourself and enjoy the process of discovering new worlds and ideas through books.

Choosing the Right Books for Personal Growth and Transformation

Choosing the right books for personal growth and transformation requires thoughtful consideration. Here are some factors to consider when selecting books that will enrich your life:

Reflect on your goals and interests: Consider what areas of personal growth you would like to focus on and choose books that align with those goals. Whether it’s self-help, spirituality, or professional development, there are books available to support your journey.
Read reviews and recommendations: Research books that have received positive reviews and recommendations from trusted sources. Look for books that have resonated with others and have a track record of inspiring personal growth and transformation.
Explore different genres and perspectives: Step out of your comfort zone and explore genres and perspectives that are new to you. By exposing yourself to diverse narratives, you expand your understanding of the world and gain fresh insights.
Consider the author’s credentials and expertise: Look into the author’s background and expertise to ensure they have the necessary knowledge and experience to guide you on your personal growth journey. Check for credentials, reviews, and recommendations before committing to a book.
Trust your intuition: Pay attention to your gut instinct when choosing books. If a particular title or synopsis resonates with you, trust that it may hold valuable insights and lessons for your personal growth.

Remember that personal growth is a lifelong journey, and the books you choose to read are a reflection of that journey. Be open to exploring new ideas and perspectives, and allow yourself to be transformed by the power of the written word.

Related: Reading These 9 Books Will Change Your Life

Incorporating Reading into Your Daily Routine

Incorporating reading into your daily routine is a surefire way to make it a regular habit. Here are some practical tips to help you make reading a part of your everyday life:

Set a reading goal: Determine how much time you want to dedicate to reading each day. It could be as little as 10 minutes or as much as an hour. Set a realistic goal that you can commit to consistently.
Create a reading schedule: Find a time in your daily schedule that works best for you. It could be in the morning, during your lunch break, or before bed. Establish a routine by consistently reading at the same time each day.
Keep a book with you at all times: Carry a book with you wherever you go, whether it’s a physical book or an e-reader. This way, you can take advantage of any free moments throughout the day, such as waiting in line or during your commute.
Make reading a priority: Treat reading as a non-negotiable part of your day. Prioritize it over other activities that may be less fulfilling or productive. By giving reading the importance it deserves, you’ll make it a priority in your life.
Create a cozy reading environment: Designate a specific reading spot in your home where you can relax and focus on your book. Make it cozy and inviting with cushions, blankets, and soft lighting.
Minimize distractions: Create a distraction-free environment by turning off your phone or putting it on silent mode. This will help you stay focused and fully immerse yourself in the book.
Keep a reading log: Keep track of the books you’ve read, along with any thoughts, reflections, or favorite quotes. This will not only serve as a record of your reading journey but also provide valuable insights for future reference.

Remember, consistency is key when it comes to developing a reading habit. By incorporating reading into your daily routine, you’ll be able to enjoy the lifelong benefits that books have to offer.

Ever read 4 books in a day?

Although reading is one of the most beneficial things that you can do for your mind, most people just can’t find the time in their days.

It can be difficult to read 500 pages a day like Warren Buffet or read 50 books a year like Bill Gates and with our daily routines and demanding day jobs, this may just not be possible.

We are here to bridge the gap!

With the Snapreads app, you get the key insights from the best nonfiction books in minutes, not hours or days. Our experts transform these books into quick, memorable, easy-to-understand insights that you can read on your time or listen on the go.

What Is Snapreads?

With the Snapreads app, you get the key insights from the best nonfiction books in minutes, not hours or days. Our experts transform these books into quick, memorable, easy-to-understand insights you can read when you have the time or listen to them on the go.

Notice : Undefined variable: title in /home/pednwwmy/public_html/snapreads/magazine/wp-content/themes/wpex-fashionista/inc/social-share.php on line 64 &summary= Notice : Undefined variable: summary in /home/pednwwmy/public_html/snapreads/magazine/wp-content/themes/wpex-fashionista/inc/social-share.php on line 64 &source=https://snapreads.com/magazine/" title="Share on LinkedIn" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href, '', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"> Share

Top Categories

Work & Success
Money & Investing
Psychology & Relationships
Mind & Body
Books lists

10 Must-Read Books for Real Estate Investors: Unlocking the Secrets of Success in the Property Market

Looking to dive into the world of real estate investing? Look no further! In this…

The Science-Backed Benefits of Reading More Books

Ever since the invention of the printing press, books have been an essential part of…

These Are the 5 Best Books on Self-Improvement, Period

Did you know… Bill Gates reads about 50 books per year. Mark Cuban reads more than…

By the Northeastern Community

What are the benefits of essay writing.

by Matthew | Sep 6, 2022 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

If you are a student in college or university, you may be wondering why essays feature so heavily in your academic career. Regardless of your major, you will probably have to write several essays each semester. In fact, essay writing is viewed as such an important skill that students are given basic essay writing assignments from as early as elementary school.

Because essay writing can be a challenge, many students naturally feel averse to it. With so many overwhelming commitments and deadlines, it is lucky that students can easily order essay online to avoid failing. That said, essay writing can help you to gain valuable lifelong skills under the right circumstances. This article will explore some of them.

Why do we get many essay assignments?

Before we go into how essay writing is useful, let us look at why students have to write so many essays. Although the academic essay has been an integral part of the higher education experience for centuries, students today are given more frequent and harder essay assignments. Why?

You may be surprised to learn that the Internet played a crucial role in increasing our essay writing workload. Because so much information has been moved from dusty tomes and academic textbooks onto the web, people can access information quicker and more conveniently than ever.

Therefore, there is no longer a need for the academic system to prioritize memorization and recollection. While examinations and recitation used to be the standard way to assess learning, they are now largely irrelevant. Instead, educational institutions are focusing their efforts on developing higher-level abilities such as critical thinking.

Hence, essay writing is now widely utilized as an effective method of evaluating the understanding and analytical skills of students. If you are wondering how this shift in the education system helps you, here are the advantages that you can gain from essay writing.

1. You learn to research and analyze evidence

If students want to create an excellent essay, they must be able to correctly locate and make use of evidence that is relevant to the topic. Finding relevant sources of information from academic journals, the Internet, and independent research is a painstaking and involved process. When doing research for your essay, you learn how to conduct efficient research and separate useful knowledge from extraneous (albeit interesting) information.

Instead of simply regurgitating concepts that you studied in class, essay writing forces you to use critical thinking. You need to determine the kind of evidence that you need and undertake the relevant research to find it. Then, you must differentiate reputable and disreputable sources of information and apply standards to the evidence that you use to support your claims.

2. You learn to construct and defend arguments

It is futile having a strong opinion about a subject without having the skills to explain your point of view and persuade others to accept it. In the process of writing an essay, you learn how to formulate and defend your arguments. You learn to develop your idea from a single point and expand it into several smaller arguments that cover various facets of the issue. In short, you learn how to give your arguments substance.

Being able to effectively communicate one’s ideas is an important part of any profession. It also helps you to become a more well-rounded person. When writing an argumentative essay, you practice anticipating and addressing opposing views, which teaches you to see your issue from different perspectives. Through essay writing, you learn to articulate your thoughts in a way that is both clear and convincing.

3. You improve your writing skills

Essay writing allows you to put your talents to the test. You can improve your overall writing ability and confidence by routinely practicing writing. When you write an essay, you become familiar with mechanical writing skills, such as grammar, spelling, and punctuation, which are critical in all forms of written communication. Outside of academia, these writing skills will help you in many aspects of your future career.

Furthermore, essay writing provides you with the opportunity to receive expert feedback. Higher education is a time for academic and personal growth. Essay writing allows you to share your thoughts and writing skills with respected professionals who have a wealth of insight and experience. Whether you send your essay to a professional editor or your professor, you will come away with valuable advice on how to improve.

4. You learn to organize effectively

Essay writing is not merely about writing. It takes a fair measure of time management and organization to fit research, planning, and writing into your busy study schedule. You also apply organizing skills to information as you consider how to best structure your content to create the most compelling arguments. As you move blocks of time and pieces of information around in your head, you become a more effective organizer.

Students are receiving essay assignments more regularly today than ever before. As essay requirements become more demanding and difficult, it helps to remember that the exercise is designed to develop your skills and not just a sadistic requirement from your professors. However, if you are truly unable to cope with your essay workload, it can help to hire a professional essay writer to lend a hand.

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

No categories

6 Scientific Benefits of Reading More

By abigail fagan | may 21, 2024.

Reading comes with some surprising benefits.

Reading transports us to worlds we would never see, introduces us to people we would never meet, and instills emotions we might never otherwise feel. It also provides an array of health benefits. Here are six scientific reasons you should be picking up more books .

Reading reduces stress.

Reading (especially reading books) may add years to your life., reading improves your language skills and knowledge of the world., reading enhances empathy., reading boosts creativity and flexibility., reading can help you transform as a person..

In 2009, scientists at the University of Sussex in the UK assessed how different activities lowered stress by measuring heart rate and muscle tension. Reading a book or newspaper for just six minutes lowered people’s stress levels by 68 percent—a stronger effect than going for a walk (42 percent), drinking a cup of tea or coffee (54 percent), or listening to music (61 percent). According to the authors, the ability to be fully immersed and distracted is what makes reading the perfect way to relieve stress.

A daily dose of reading may lengthen your lifespan. A team at Yale University followed more than 3600 adults over the age of 50 for 12 years. They discovered that people who reported reading books for 30 minutes a day lived nearly two years longer than those who read magazines or newspapers. Participants who read more than 3.5 hours per week were 23 percent less likely to die, and participants who read less than 3.5 hours per week were 17 percent less likely to die. “The benefits of reading books include a longer life in which to read them,” the authors wrote.

In the 1990s, reading pioneer Keith Stanovich and his colleagues conducted dozens of reading studies to assess the relationship between cognitive skills, vocabulary, factual knowledge, and exposure to certain fiction and nonfiction authors. They used the Author Recognition Test (ART), which is a strong predictor of reading skill. Stanovich tells Mental Floss that the average result of these studies was that avid readers, as measured by the ART, had around a 50 percent larger vocabulary and 50 percent more fact-based knowledge.

Reading both predicts and contributes to those skills, according to Donald Bolger , a human development professor at the University of Maryland who researches how the brain learns to read. “It’s like a snowball effect,” he tells Mental Floss. “The better you are at reading, the more words you learn. The more words you learn, the better you are at reading and comprehending—especially things that would have been outside your domain of expertise.”

For a 2013 Harvard study, a group of volunteers either read literary fiction (such as “ Corrie ” by Alice Munro), popular fiction (such as “ Space Jockey ” by Robert Heinlein), nonfiction (such as “How the Potato Changed the World” by Charles Mann), or nothing. Across five experiments, those who read literary fiction performed better on tasks like predicting how characters would act and identifying the emotion encoded in facial expressions. These speak to the ability to understand others’ mental states, which scientists call Theory of Mind.

“If we engage with characters who are nuanced, unpredictable, and difficult to understand, then I think we’re more likely to approach people in the real world with an interest and humility necessary for dealing with complex individuals,” study lead author David Kidd , a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, tells Mental Floss.

Woman holding book in front of her face and laughing

“In our real lives, we often feel like we have to make a decision, and therefore we close our mind to information that could eventually help us,” says Maja Djikic , a psychologist at the University of Toronto. “When we read fiction, we practice keeping our minds open because we can afford uncertainty.”

Djikic came to that conclusion after she conducted a study in which 100 people were assigned to read a fictional story or a nonfiction essay. The participants then completed questionnaires intended to assess their level of cognitive closure, which is the need to reach a conclusion quickly and avoid ambiguity in the decision-making process. The fiction readers emerged as more flexible and creative than the essay readers—and the effect was strongest for people who read on a regular basis.

It’s not often that we can identify moments when our personality changes and evolves, but reading fiction may help us do just that. The same University of Toronto research team asked 166 people to fill out questionnaires regarding their emotions and key personality traits, based on the widely used Big Five Inventory, which measures extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability/neuroticism, and openness. Then half of the group read Anton Chekhov’s short story “The Lady with the Toy Dog,” about a man who travels to a resort and has an affair with a married woman. The other half of the group read a similar nonfiction version presented as a report from divorce court. Afterwards, everyone answered the same personality questions they’d answered previously—and many of the fiction readers’ responses had significantly changed. They saw themselves differently after reading about others’ fictional experience. The nonfiction readers didn’t undergo this shift in self-reflection.

“As you identify with another person, a protagonist in the story, you enter into a piece of life that you wouldn’t otherwise have known. You have emotions or circumstances that you wouldn’t have otherwise understood,” Keith Oatley , a University of Toronto psychologist and one of the study’s authors, tells Mental Floss. Imagining new experiences creates a space in which readers can grow and change.

Discover More Articles About Books and Reading:

A version of this story ran in 2018; it has been updated for 2024.

5 Reasons Reading is So Important for Student Success

Insights from the School of Education and Social Policy at Merrimack College

It seems so simple. Of course, students should learn to read. That’s been understood for generations. No one is going to argue against the importance of student literacy.

However, many don’t understand just how important student literacy and reading are to student development, starting at a very young age. The American Pediatrics Association reports that reading when young – even infants being read to by their parents – increases academic success down the road.

However, many children enter kindergarten without the skills needed to read well. Helping students bridge that skills gap falls to those who have trained to become elementary school teachers . They play a significant role in the development of young minds in this vital area.

How important?

Here are some of the ways student literacy impacts a young mind.

Self esteem.

This might be the most important area of all. The sooner students develop reading skills, the more they gain ground in the areas listed below. That leads to more assurance in how they speak and write, as well as giving them the confidence of an expanded knowledge base. When students start at an early age to read about diverse people, distant places, and historical events, they become more creative and open. Also, those who have read a lot will naturally be asked to answer more questions – another confidence builder for a young student.

Improved Concentration

An emphasis on reading and student literacy helps develop higher levels of focus and concentration. It also forces the reader to sort things out in their own mind – including topics that might not be familiar to them at all (Paris at the end of World War II, for example, or another planet in a science fiction novel). This type of concentration on one topic – rather than trying to do many things at once – leads to better focus even after the book is put down.

Critical and Analytical Thinking Skills

The classic here is when a young reader becomes absorbed with a mystery book – Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew were examples for generations of Americans – and manages to solve the mystery in her head before the books reveal it. That’s a simple example of how reading helps students develop better critical and analytical skills, something that carries over even after they have put the book down.

Stronger Memory Skills

Think about reading. Even an elementary age child with a relatively simple book must keep in mind a group of characters, the setting, and past actions. Reading helps to strengthen memory retention skills. That’s a powerful tool for young students – and older adults, as well.

Expanded Vocabulary

How many times do we all search for just the right word to express what we’re trying to say? Readers do that less. They have a larger vocabulary, and the words that young readers learn in a book will eventually make their way into their speech.

These are some of the most powerful ways that reading is important for student success. For those who have decided to teach children at the elementary school level, the impact they make on students in this vital area can resonate throughout the rest of their lives.

Request Information

Research and teaching writing

Published: 12 July 2021
Volume 34 , pages 1613–1621, ( 2021 )

Cite this article

Steve Graham 1 , 2 &
Rui A. Alves 3

12k Accesses

14 Citations

3 Altmetric

Explore all metrics

Writing is an essential but complex skill that students must master if they are to take full advantage of educational, occupational, and civic responsibilities. Schools, and the teachers who work in them, are tasked with teaching students how to write. Knowledge about how to teach writing can be obtained from many different sources, including one’s experience teaching or being taught to write, observing others teach writing, and advise offered by writing experts. It is difficult to determine if much of the lore teachers acquire through these methods are effective, generalizable, or reliable unless they are scientifically tested. This special issue of Reading & Writing includes 11 writing intervention studies conducted primarily with students in the elementary grades. It provides important new information on evidence-based writing practices.

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

There are many different ways that teachers can learn about how to teach writing. One way of acquiring such knowledge is by teaching this skill to others. As teachers apply different instructional procedures, they form judgments about the value and efficacy of these practices. In essence, they learn by doing (Graham, 2018 ).

A second way teachers learn about how to teach writing is by observing others and learning from them (Graham, 2018 ). Teachers likely remember some of the instructional methods used by those who taught them to write (e.g., teachers, mentors, parents, guardians, and peers). They may in turn adopt some of these practices when they teach their own students. This may be particularly true for instructional practices they considered effective.

Teachers can gain additional insight into teaching writing by observing and absorbing insights offered by others who have taught writing or studied how to teach it. This includes knowledge acquired from instructors teaching literacy and writing courses as well as experts offering advice on writing instruction at conferences, through workshops, podcasts, or other forms of information sharing. Teachers may also learn about teaching writing by discussing this topic with their peers or observing them as they teach writing.

A third source of knowledge that teachers can access are published materials about how to teach writing. This includes textbooks and articles on the subject, curriculum guides, commercial materials, and position statements from professional organizations to provide just a few examples. These resources can further involve digital sources such as videos demonstrating how to apply specific writing procedures, experts promoting specific teaching techniques, or web sites devoted to writing instruction.

The concern

Given all of the possible knowledge sources teachers can access or experience, there is an abundance of information, recommendations, and teaching materials on how to teach writing that is available to teachers. This blessing experiences at least one serious limitation. Too often, there is limited, circumscribed, or no evidence that the proffered advice, know-how, or wisdom works. There are many claims about what is effective, but too little proof. Unfortunately, this observation applies to much of the lore that teachers acquire about writing instruction.

Teaching lore mainly involves writing practices teachers experienced when they learned to write, instructional practices teachers develop and apply with their students, writing practices they see other teachers apply, and teaching practices promoted by experts (Graham & Harris, 2014 ). While we have no doubt that teachers and experts possess considerable knowledge and insight about how to teach writing, basing the teaching of this complex skill on such lore alone is risky.

Why is this the case? One reason is that it is difficult to determine which aspects of teaching lore are valid. For example, there are many things a teacher does while teaching writing. When their students’ writing improves, they may attribute this change to specific procedures they applied. While this evaluation may be correct, it is also possible that this judgment is incorrect or only applies to some students or to a procedure in a given context.

Teachers are not the only ones who can succumb to such selective bias. Specific teaching lore promoted by writing experts are also susceptible to misinterpretation in terms of their effectiveness. To illustrate, writing experts can overestimate the impact of favored instructional methods, forming judgments consistent with their philosophical views on writing development or instruction. For instance, proponents of the whole language approach to learning to read and write believed that writing and reading develop naturally just like oral language (Goodman, 1992 ). Consistent with these beliefs, they championed an approach to literacy instruction based on the use of informal teaching methods (e.g., reading and writing for real purposes), while at the same time deemphasizing explicitly and systematically teaching students foundational writing and reading skills and strategies (Graham & Harris, 1997 ). Instead, these skills are only taught when the need arises, mostly through short mini-lessons. Advocates for whole language frequently promoted the effectiveness of this two-pronged approach (Begeron, 1990 ), without providing much in the way of empirical evidence that it was effective, or perhaps even more importantly, that it was as effective as other alternatives such as reading and writing programs that emphasized reading and writing for real purposes, coupled with systematic and explicit skills and strategy instruction (Graham & Harris, 1994 ). Even for fundamental writing skills such as spelling, there is considerable evidence that both informal teaching and explicit instruction are effective (Graham, 2000 ; Graham & Santangelo, 2014 ), while whole language approaches are fundamentally misguided about what is written language (Liberman, 1999 ).

Whole language is not the only approach to teaching writing that has suffered from questionable claims about its effectiveness. Even the venerable Donald Graves was guilty of this to some degree with the process approach to writing that he supported and advocated (see Smagorinski, 1987 ). The evidence he offered in support of his favored approach to teaching writing relied in large part on testimonials and exemplar writing of selected students, presenting a potentially overly optimistic assessment of this approach. This is not to say that the process approach is ineffective, as there is now considerable empirical evidence supporting the opposite conclusion (Sandmel & Graham, 2011 ). Instead, this example illustrates that adopting whole cloth even highly popular and widely used teaching lore without careful consideration of its effectiveness and the evidence available to support it can be risky. The lack of evidence or the type of evidence provided can make it extremely difficult for teachers or other interested parties to determine if the testimonials or evidence used to support specific teaching lore in writing are representative or atypical.

A third issue that makes some teaching lore risky is that it may be based on the experience of a single or a very small number of teachers. As an example, this can occur for knowledge a teacher acquires as a result of his or her experience teaching writing. The teaching practice(s) may in fact be effective for the students in this teacher’s classroom, but they may not be effective when applied by another teacher or with different students. Until this proposition is tested, there is no way to determine if this teaching lore will produce reliable results when applied more broadly.

As these concerns demonstrate, the validity, generalizability, and replicability of instructional practices based on teaching lore are uncertain. This is not to devalue what teachers or experts know, but to demonstrate the limits of this knowledge.

Evidence-based writing practices

The concerns about the value of teaching lore raised above raises the question: How should the structure and details of writing instruction be determined? The solution that we recommend is to take an evidence-based practice approach to both enhance teachers’ knowledge and develop writing instruction. Starting with medicine in the 1990s, and spreading quickly to psychology, informational science, business, education, and a host of other disciplines, this movement promoted the idea that practitioners in a field should apply the best scientific evidence available to make informed and judicious decisions for their clients (Sackett et al., 1996 ). The basic assumption underlying this approach is that the findings from research can positively impact practice. The evidence-based practice movement was a reaction to practitioners basing what they did almost strictly on tradition and lore, without scientific evidence to validate it.

One reason why this represents a positive step forward in education and the teaching of writing is that instructional practices based on high quality intervention research addresses the three issues of concern we raised about teaching lore. First, high quality intervention studies address the issue of validity. They are designed specifically to isolate the effects of a specific instructional practice or set of instructional practices. They provide systematically gathered evidence on whether the instructional practices tested produced the desired impact. They further apply methodological procedures to rule out alternative explanations for observed effects. Second, high quality intervention studies address issues of generalizability by describing the participants and the context in which the practice was applied, and by using statistical procedures to determine the confidence that can be placed in specific findings. Three, they address the issue of replicability, as the replication of effects across multiple situations is the hall mark of scientific testing (Graham & Harris, 2014 ).

Another reason why the evidence-based approach represents a positive step forward in terms of teaching writing is that the evidence gathered from high quality intervention studies can provide a general set of guidelines for designing an effective writing program. Graham et al. ( 2016 ) created such a roadmap by drawing on three sources of scientific evidence: true-and quasi- experimental writing intervention studies, single-case design studies, and qualitative studies of how exceptional literacy teachers taught writing (see also Graham & Harris, 2018 ). They indicated that the scientific evidence from these three sources supports the development of writing programs that include the following. Students write frequently. They are supported by teachers and peers as they write. Essential writing skills, strategies, and knowledge are taught. Students use word processors and other twenty-first century tools to write. Writing occurs in a positive and motivating environment. Writing is used to support learning. Based on several recent meta-analyses of high quality intervention studies (Graham, et al., 2018a , b ; Graham, et al., 2018a , b ), Graham now recommends that the evidence also supports connecting writing and reading instruction (Graham, 2019 , 2020 ).

A third reason why the evidence-based approach is a positive development is that it provides teachers with a variety of techniques for teaching writing that have been shown to be effective in other teachers’ classes and in multiple situations. While this does not guarantee that a specific evidence-based practices is effective in all situations, a highly unlikely proposition for any writing practice, it does provide teachers with instructional procedures with a proven track record. This includes, but is not limited to (Graham & Harris, 2018 ; Graham et al., 2016 ):

Setting goals for writing.

Teaching general as well as genre-specific strategies for planning, revising, editing, and regulating the writing process. Engaging students in prewriting practices for gathering, organizing, and evaluation possible writing contents and plans.

Teaching sentence construction skills with sentence-combining procedures.

Providing students with feedback about their writing and their progress learning new writing skills.

Teaching handwriting, spelling, and typing.

Increasing how much students write; analyzing and emulating model texts.

Teaching vocabulary for writing.

Creating routines for students to help each other as they write.

Putting into place procedures for enhancing motivation.

Teaching paragraph writing skills.

Employing technology such as word processing that makes it easier to write.

It is also important to realize that an evidence-based approach to writing does not mean that teachers should abandon the hard-earned knowledge they have acquired through their experiences as teachers or learners. The evidence-based movement emphasizes that teachers contextualize knowledge about teaching writing acquired through research with their own knowledge about their students, the context in which they work, and what they know about writing and teaching it (Graham et al., 2016 ). When applying instructional practices acquired through research as well as teaching lore, we recommend that teachers weigh the benefits, limitations, and possible harm that might ensue as a consequence of applying any teaching procedure. Once a decision is made to apply a specific practice, it is advisable to monitor its effectiveness and make adjustments as needed.

Finally, while the scientific testing of writing practices has provided considerable insight into how writing can be taught effectively, it is not broad, deep, or rich enough to tell us all we need to know about teaching writing. It is highly unlikely that this will ever be the case. We operate on the principle that there is no single best method for teaching writing to all students, nor is it likely that science will provide us with formulas to prescribe exactly how writing should be taught to each student individually. Writing, learning, children, and the contexts in which they operate are just too complex to make this a likely consequence of the evidence-based movement. As a result, we believe that the best writing instruction will be provided by teachers who apply evidence-based practices in conjunction with the best knowledge they have acquired as teachers and learners, using each of these forms of knowledge in an intelligent, judicious, and critical manner.

Over time, we anticipate that evidence-based practices will play an ever increasing role in the process described above. This is inevitable as our knowledge about evidence-based writing practices expands. This brings us to the purpose of this special issue of Reading & Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal . This special issue presents 11 writing intervention studies focusing almost exclusively with students in the elementary grades. These studies were conducted in Europe and the United States, and they replicate and extend prior research conducted with young developing writers.

The special issue

Perhaps the most tested writing instructional practice of all time, and the one yielding the largest effects sizes (Graham et al., 2013 ), is the Self-regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model developed by Karen Harris (see Harris et al., 2008 for a description of this approach). Several studies in the current special issue tested specific iterations of the use of the SRSD model as a means for teaching writing to elementary grade students. Collins and her colleagues examined the effectiveness of teaching third grade students in the United States task specific strategies for planning and drafting expository essays using information from social studies text using this model. This instruction enhanced the quality of students’ texts and resulted in improvement on a norm-referenced measure of writing where students identified their favorite game and provided reasons why this was the case.

In a second SRSD study conducted with second and third grade children in Spain, Salas and her colleagues examined if teaching planning and drafting strategies for writing an opinion essay was equally effective with children from more and less disadvantaged backgrounds. SRSD was equally effective in improving the opinion writing of children from both backgrounds, but carryover effects to reading comprehension (a skill not taught in this study) only occurred for students from less disadvantaged backgrounds.

A third study by Rosario and his colleagues involved a secondary analysis of data from an investigation in Portugal where third grade students were taught to write narratives using SRSD procedures and a story writing tool they developed. Their reanalysis focused on students experiencing difficulties learning to write showing that they differed in their approach and perceptions of teacher feedback. The majority of these children were able to use the feedback provided by their teacher and viewed it as helpful.

A fourth investigation by Hebert and his colleagues taught fourth grade students in the United States to write informational text using five text structures (description, compare/contrast, sequence of events, problem–solution, and cause effect). While the authors did not indicate they used SRSD to teach these strategies, the teaching methods mirrored this approach. In any event, the instruction provided to these children enhanced how well they wrote all five of these different kinds of text. These effects, however, did not generalize to better reading performance.

Lopez and her colleagues in Spain examined three approaches to improving sixth grade students’ writing. Students in all three conditions were taught how to set communicative goals for their writing. Students in one treatment condition were taught a strategy for revising. Students in a second treatment condition observed a reader trying to comprehend a text and suggesting ways it might be improved. Control students continued with the goal setting procedures. Students in both treatment conditions improved their writing and revising skills more than control students, but there were no differences between these two treatments.

In another Spanish study conducted by Rodriguez-Malaga and colleagues, the impact of two different treatments on the writing of fourth grade students was examined. One treatment group learned how to set product goals for their writing, whereas the other writing treatment group learned how to set product goals and strategies for planning compare/contrast texts. Only the students in the product goal and planning strategy treatment evidenced improved writing when compared to control students.

Philippakos and Voggt examined the effectiveness of on-line practice-based professional development (PBPD) for teaching genre-based writing strategies. Eighty-four second grade teachers were randomly assigned to PBPD or a no-treatment control condition. Treatment teachers taught the genre-based writing strategies with high fidelity and rated PBPD positively. Even more importantly, their students writing evidenced greater improvement than the writing of students in control teachers’ classes.

Walter and her colleagues in England examined the effectiveness of two writing interventions, sentence combining and spelling instruction, with 7 to 10 year old children experiencing difficulties learning to write. As expected, sentence combining instruction improved sentence construction skills, but even more importantly, these researchers found that the degree of improvements in sentence writing was related to students’ initial sentence, spelling, and reading skills.

In another study focused on improving students’ sentence construction skills, Arfé and her colleagues in Italy examined the effectiveness of an oral language intervention to improve the sentence construction skills of fifth and tenth grade students. This oral treatment did enhance the sentence writing skills of the younger fifth grade students. This study provides needed evidence that interventions aimed at improving oral language skills transfer to writing.

Chung and his colleagues in the United States examined if sixth grade students’ writing can be improved through self-assessment, planning and goal setting, and self-reflection when they revised a timed, on-demand essay. These students as well as students in the control condition were also taught how to revise such an essay. Treatment students evidenced greater writing gains, and were more confident about their revising capabilities than control students.

Lastly, Graham and his colleagues in the United States examined if the revising behavior of fourth grade students experiencing difficulties with writing can be enhanced through the use of revising goals that focused attention on making substantive when revising stories (e.g., change the setting of the story). Applying such goals across four stories had a positive effect on the revising behavior of these students when these goals were not in effect, resulting in more text-level revisions, more revisions that changed the meaning of text, and more revisions rated as improving text.

The 11 intervention studies in this special issue of Reading & Writing are particularly noteworthy for several reasons. One, some of these studies ( n = 4) concentrated on improving students’ skills in writing informational and expository text. This is an area that has not received enough attention in existing writing literature. Two, enhancing students’ revising was the goal of multiple studies ( n = 4). Again, too little attention has been given to this topic with either younger or older students. Three, it was especially gratifying to see that a pair of studies examined how to enhance sentence writing skills. This has been a neglected area of writing research since the 1980s. Four, multiple studies focused on improving the writing of students who experienced difficulties learning to write ( n = 3). This is an area where we need much more research if we are to maximize these students’ writing success. Finally, more than half of the studies in this special issue ( n = 6) were conducted in Europe, with the other half conducted in the United States. It is important to examine if specific writing treatments are effective in different social, cultural, political, institutional, and historical context (Graham, 2018 ), as was done with the four studies that applied SRSD to teach students strategies for writing.

We hope you enjoy the studies presented here. We further hope they serve as a catalyst to improve your own research if you are a writing scholar or your teaching if you are a practitioner.

Begeron, B. (1990). What does the term whole language mean? constructing a definition from the literature. Journal of Reading Behavior, 22 , 301–329. https://doi.org/10.1080/10862969009547716

Article Google Scholar

Goodman, K. (1992). I didn’t found whole language. The Reading Teacher, 46 , 188–199.

Google Scholar

Graham, S. (2000). Should the natural learning approach replace traditional spelling instruction. Journal of Educational Psychology, 92 , 235–247. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.92.2.235

Graham, S. (2018). The writer(s)-within-community model of writing. Educational Psychologist, 53 , 258–279. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2018.1481406

Graham, S. (2019). Changing how writing is taught. Review of Research in Education, 43 , 277–303. https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732x18821125

Graham, S. (2020). The sciences of reading and writing must become more fully integrated. Reading Research Quarterly, 55 (S1), S35–S44.

Graham, S., & Harris, K. R. (1997). It can be taught, but it does not develop naturally: myths and realities in writing instruction. School Psychology Review, 26 , 414–424. https://doi.org/10.1080/02796015.1997.12085875

Graham, S., & Harris, K. R. (2014). Conducting high quality writing intervention research: twelve recommendations. Journal of Writing Research, 6 (2), 89–123. https://doi.org/10.17239/jowr-2014.06.02.1

Graham, S., & Harris, K. R. (2018). Evidence-based writing practices: A meta-analysis of existing meta-analyses. In R. Fidalgo, K. R. Harris, & M. Braaksma (Eds.), Design Principles for teaching effective writing: Theoretical and empirical grounded principles (pp. 13–37). Brill Editions.

Graham, S., Harris, K. R., & Chambers, A. (2016). Evidence-based practice and writing instruction. In C. MacArthur, S. Graham, & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of Writing Research (2: 211–226). NY; Guilford.

Graham, S., Harris, K. R., & McKeown, D. (2013). The writing of students with LD and a meta-analysis of SRSD writing intervention studies: Redux. In L. Swanson, K. R. Harris, & S. Graham (Eds.), Handbook of Learning Disabilities (2nd ed., pp. 405–438). Guilford Press.

Graham, S., & Harris, . (1994). The effects of whole language on writing: a review of literature. Educational Psychologist, 29 , 187–192. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep2904_2

Graham, S., Liu, K., Aitken, A., Ng, C., Bartlett, B., Harris, K. R., & Holzapel, J. (2018a). Effectiveness of literacy programs balancing reading and writing instruction: a meta-analysis. Reading Research Quarterly, 53 , 279–304. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.194

Graham, S., Liu, K., Bartlett, B., Ng, C., Harris, K. R., Aitken, A., Barkel, A., Kavanaugh, C., & Talukdar, J. (2018b). Reading for writing: a meta-analysis of the impact of reading and reading instruction on writing. Review of Educational Research, 88 , 243–284. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654317746927

Graham, S., & Santangelo, T. (2014). Does spelling instruction make students better spellers, readers, and writers? a meta-analytic review. Reading & Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 27 , 1703–1743. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-014-9517-0

Harris, K. R., Graham, S., Mason, L., & Friedlander, B. (2008). Powerful writing strategies for all students. Baltimore, MD: Brookes.

Liberman, A. M. (1999). The reading researcher and the reading teacher need the right theory of speech. Scientific Studies of Reading, 3 (2), 95–111. https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532799xssr0302_1

Sackett, D., Rosenberg, W., Gray, J., Haynes, R., & Richardson, W. (1996). Evidence based medicine: what it is and what it isn’t. British Medical Journal, 312 , 71–72. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.312.7023.71

Sandmel, K., & Graham, S. (2011). The process writing approach: a meta-analysis. Journal of Educational Research, 104 , 396–407. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2010.488703

Smagorinski, P. (1987). Graves revisited: a look at the methods and conclusions of the New Hampshire study. Written Communication, 4 , 331–342. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088387004004001

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA

Steve Graham

Australian Catholic University, Brisbane, Australia

University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

Rui A. Alves

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rui A. Alves .

Additional information

Publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Graham, S., Alves, R.A. Research and teaching writing. Read Writ 34 , 1613–1621 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-021-10188-9

Download citation

Accepted : 29 June 2021

Published : 12 July 2021

Issue Date : September 2021

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-021-10188-9

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Writing intervention
Evidence-based
Elementary grades
Writing instruction
Find a journal
Publish with us
Track your research

How Does Writing Fit Into the ‘Science of Reading’?

In one sense, the national conversation about what it will take to make sure all children become strong readers has been wildly successful: States are passing legislation supporting evidence-based teaching approaches , and school districts are rushing to supply training. Publishers are under pressure to drop older materials . And for the first time in years, an instructional issue—reading—is headlining education media coverage.

In the middle of all that, though, the focus on the “science of reading” has elided its twin component in literacy instruction: writing.

Writing is intrinsically important for all students to learn—after all, it is the primary way beyond speech that humans communicate. But more than that, research suggests that teaching students to write in an integrated fashion with reading is not only efficient, it’s effective.

Yet writing is often underplayed in the elementary grades. Too often, it is separated from schools’ reading block. Writing is not assessed as frequently as reading, and principals, worried about reading-exam scores, direct teachers to focus on one often at the expense of the other. Finally, beyond the English/language arts block, kids often aren’t asked to do much writing in early grades.

“Sometimes, in an early-literacy classroom, you’ll hear a teacher say, ‘It’s time to pick up your pencils,’” said Wiley Blevins, an author and literacy consultant who provides training in schools. “But your pencils should be in your hand almost the entire morning.”

Strikingly, many of the critiques that reading researchers have made against the “balanced literacy” approach that has held sway in schools for decades could equally apply to writing instruction: Foundational writing skills—like phonics and language structure—have not generally been taught systematically or explicitly.

And like the “find the main idea” strategies commonly taught in reading comprehension, writing instruction has tended to focus on content-neutral tasks, rather than deepening students’ connections to the content they learn.

Education Week wants to bring more attention to these connections in the stories that make up this special collection . But first, we want to delve deeper into the case for including writing in every step of the elementary curriculum.

Why has writing been missing from the reading conversation?

Much like the body of knowledge on how children learn to read words, it is also settled science that reading and writing draw on shared knowledge, even though they have traditionally been segmented in instruction.

“The body of research is substantial in both number of studies and quality of studies. There’s no question that reading and writing share a lot of real estate, they depend on a lot of the same knowledge and skills,” said Timothy Shanahan, an emeritus professor of education at the University of Illinois Chicago. “Pick your spot: text structure, vocabulary, sound-symbol relationships, ‘world knowledge.’”

The reasons for the bifurcation in reading and writing are legion. One is that the two fields have typically been studied separately. (Researchers studying writing usually didn’t examine whether a writing intervention, for instance, also aided students’ reading abilities—and vice versa.)

Some scholars also finger the dominance of the federally commissioned National Reading Panel report, which in 2000 outlined key instructional components of learning to read. The review didn’t examine the connection of writing to reading.

Looking even further back yields insights, too. Penmanship and spelling were historically the only parts of writing that were taught, and when writing reappeared in the latter half of the 20th century, it tended to focus on “process writing,” emphasizing personal experience and story generation over other genres. Only when the Common Core State Standards appeared in 2010 did the emphasis shift to writing about nonfiction texts and across subjects—the idea that students should be writing about what they’ve learned.

And finally, teaching writing is hard. Few studies document what preparation teachers receive to teach writing, but in surveys, many teachers say they received little training in their college education courses. That’s probably why only a little over half of teachers, in one 2016 survey, said that they enjoyed teaching writing.

Writing should begin in the early grades

These factors all work against what is probably the most important conclusion from the research over the last few decades: Students in the early-elementary grades need lots of varied opportunities to write.

“Students need support in their writing,” said Dana Robertson, an associate professor of reading and literacy education at the school of education at Virginia Tech who also studies how instructional change takes root in schools. “They need to be taught explicitly the skills and strategies of writing and they need to see the connections of reading, writing, and knowledge development.”

While research supports some fundamental tenets of writing instruction—that it should be structured, for instance, and involve drafting and revising—it hasn’t yet pointed to a specific teaching recipe that works best.

One of the challenges, the researchers note, is that while reading curricula have improved over the years, they still don’t typically provide many supports for students—or teachers, for that matter—for writing. Teachers often have to supplement with additions that don’t always mesh well with their core, grade-level content instruction.

“We have a lot of activities in writing we know are good,” Shanahan said. “We don’t really have a yearlong elementary-school-level curriculum in writing. That just doesn’t exist the way it does in reading.”

Nevertheless, practitioners like Blevins work writing into every reading lesson, even in the earliest grades. And all the components that make up a solid reading program can be enhanced through writing activities.

4 Key Things to Know About How Reading and Writing Interlock

Want a quick summary of what research tells us about the instructional connections between reading and writing?

1. Reading and writing are intimately connected.

Research on the connections began in the early 1980s and has grown more robust with time.

Among the newest and most important additions are three research syntheses conducted by Steve Graham, a professor at the University of Arizona, and his research partners. One of them examined whether writing instruction also led to improvements in students’ reading ability; a second examined the inverse question. Both found significant positive effects for reading and writing.

A third meta-analysis gets one step closer to classroom instruction. Graham and partners examined 47 studies of instructional programs that balanced both reading and writing—no program could feature more than 60 percent of one or the other. The results showed generally positive effects on both reading and writing measures.

2. Writing matters even at the earliest grades, when students are learning to read.

Studies show that the prewriting students do in early education carries meaningful signals about their decoding, spelling, and reading comprehension later on. Reading experts say that students should be supported in writing almost as soon as they begin reading, and evidence suggests that both spelling and handwriting are connected to the ability to connect speech to print and to oral language development.

3. Like reading, writing must be taught explicitly.

Writing is a complex task that demands much of students’ cognitive resources. Researchers generally agree that writing must be explicitly taught—rather than left up to students to “figure out” the rules on their own.

There isn’t as much research about how precisely to do this. One 2019 review, in fact, found significant overlap among the dozen writing programs studied, and concluded that all showed signs of boosting learning. Debates abound about the amount of structure students need and in what sequence, such as whether they need to master sentence construction before moving onto paragraphs and lengthier texts.

But in general, students should be guided on how to construct sentences and paragraphs, and they should have access to models and exemplars, the research suggests. They also need to understand the iterative nature of writing, including how to draft and revise.

A number of different writing frameworks incorporating various degrees of structure and modeling are available, though most of them have not been studied empirically.

4. Writing can help students learn content—and make sense of it.

Much of reading comprehension depends on helping students absorb “world knowledge”—think arts, ancient cultures, literature, and science—so that they can make sense of increasingly sophisticated texts and ideas as their reading improves. Writing can enhance students’ content learning, too, and should be emphasized rather than taking a back seat to the more commonly taught stories and personal reflections.

Graham and colleagues conducted another meta-analysis of nearly 60 studies looking at this idea of “writing to learn” in mathematics, science, and social studies. The studies included a mix of higher-order assignments, like analyses and argumentative writing, and lower-level ones, like summarizing and explaining. The study found that across all three disciplines, writing about the content improved student learning.

If students are doing work on phonemic awareness—the ability to recognize sounds—they shouldn’t merely manipulate sounds orally; they can put them on the page using letters. If students are learning how to decode, they can also encode—record written letters and words while they say the sounds out loud.

And students can write as they begin learning about language structure. When Blevins’ students are mainly working with decodable texts with controlled vocabularies, writing can support their knowledge about how texts and narratives work: how sentences are put together and how they can be pulled apart and reconstructed. Teachers can prompt them in these tasks, asking them to rephrase a sentence as a question, split up two sentences, or combine them.

“Young kids are writing these mile-long sentences that become second nature. We set a higher bar, and they are fully capable of doing it. We can demystify a bit some of that complex text if we develop early on how to talk about sentences—how they’re created, how they’re joined,” Blevins said. “There are all these things you can do that are helpful to develop an understanding of how sentences work and to get lots of practice.”

As students progress through the elementary grades, this structured work grows more sophisticated. They need to be taught both sentence and paragraph structure , and they need to learn how different writing purposes and genres—narrative, persuasive, analytical—demand different approaches. Most of all, the research indicates, students need opportunities to write at length often.

Using writing to support students’ exploration of content

Reading is far more than foundational skills, of course. It means introducing students to rich content and the specialized vocabulary in each discipline and then ensuring that they read, discuss, analyze, and write about those ideas. The work to systematically build students’ knowledge begins in the early grades and progresses throughout their K-12 experience.

Here again, available evidence suggests that writing can be a useful tool to help students explore, deepen, and draw connections in this content. With the proper supports, writing can be a method for students to retell and analyze what they’ve learned in discussions of content and literature throughout the school day —in addition to their creative writing.

This “writing to learn” approach need not wait for students to master foundational skills. In the K-2 grades especially, much content is learned through teacher read-alouds and conversation that include more complex vocabulary and ideas than the texts students are capable of reading. But that should not preclude students from writing about this content, experts say.

“We do a read-aloud or a media piece and we write about what we learned. It’s just a part of how you’re responding, or sharing, what you’ve learned across texts; it’s not a separate thing from reading,” Blevins said. “If I am doing read-alouds on a concept—on animal habitats, for example—my decodable texts will be on animals. And students are able to include some of these more sophisticated ideas and language in their writing, because we’ve elevated the conversations around these texts.”

In this set of stories , Education Week examines the connections between elementary-level reading and writing in three areas— encoding , language and text structure , and content-area learning . But there are so many more examples.

Please write us to share yours when you’ve finished.

Want to read more about the research that informed this story? Here’s a bibliography to start you off.

Berninger V. W., Abbott, R. D., Abbott, S. P., Graham S., & Richards T. (2002). Writing and reading: Connections between language by hand and language by eye. J ournal of Learning Disabilities. Special Issue: The Language of Written Language, 35(1), 39–56 Berninger, Virginia, Robert D. Abbott, Janine Jones, Beverly J. Wolf, Laura Gould, Marci Anderson-Younstrom, Shirley Shimada, Kenn Apel. (2006) “Early development of language by hand: composing, reading, listening, and speaking connections; three letter-writing modes; and fast mapping in spelling.” Developmental Neuropsychology, 29(1), pp. 61-92 Cabell, Sonia Q, Laura S. Tortorelli, and Hope K. Gerde (2013). “How Do I Write…? Scaffolding Preschoolers’ Early Writing Skills.” The Reading Teacher, 66(8), pp. 650-659. Gerde, H.K., Bingham, G.E. & Wasik, B.A. (2012). “Writing in Early Childhood Classrooms: Guidance for Best Practices.” Early Childhood Education Journal 40, 351–359 (2012) Gilbert, Jennifer, and Steve Graham. (2010). “Teaching Writing to Elementary Students in Grades 4–6: A National Survey.” The Elementary School Journal 110(44) Graham, Steve, et al. (2017). “Effectiveness of Literacy Programs Balancing Reading and Writing Instruction: A Meta-Analysis.” Reading Research Quarterly, 53(3) pp. 279–304 Graham, Steve, and Michael Hebert. (2011). “Writing to Read: A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Writing and Writing Instruction on Reading.” Harvard Educational Review (2011) 81(4): 710–744. Graham, Steve. (2020). “The Sciences of Reading and Writing Must Become More Fully Integrated.” Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1) pp. S35–S44 Graham, Steve, Sharlene A. Kiuhara, and Meade MacKay. (2020).”The Effects of Writing on Learning in Science, Social Studies, and Mathematics: A Meta-Analysis.” Review of Educational Research April 2020, Vol 90, No. 2, pp. 179–226 Shanahan, Timothy. “History of Writing and Reading Connections.” in Shanahan, Timothy. (2016). “Relationships between reading and writing development.” In C. MacArthur, S. Graham, & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of writing research (2nd ed., pp. 194–207). New York, NY: Guilford. Slavin, Robert, Lake, C., Inns, A., Baye, A., Dachet, D., & Haslam, J. (2019). “A quantitative synthesis of research on writing approaches in grades 2 to 12.” London: Education Endowment Foundation. Troia, Gary. (2014). Evidence-based practices for writing instruction (Document No. IC-5). Retrieved from University of Florida, Collaboration for Effective Educator, Development, Accountability, and Reform Center website: http://ceedar.education.ufl.edu/tools/innovation-configuration/ Troia, Gary, and Steve Graham. (2016).“Common Core Writing and Language Standards and Aligned State Assessments: A National Survey of Teacher Beliefs and Attitudes.” Reading and Writing 29(9).

A version of this article appeared in the January 25, 2023 edition of Education Week as How Does Writing Fit Into the ‘Science of Reading’?

Young writer looking at a flash card showing a picture of a dog and writing various words that begin with a "D" like dog, donut, duck and door.

Sign Up for EdWeek Update

Edweek top school jobs.

Image of a seventh-grade student looking through books in her school library.

Sign Up & Sign In

Benefits of Reading & Writing Skills

Children who read tend to do better at school and professionally. The rise in technology means increased demands for higher literacy and consequences are grievous for those who fall short, according to "Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children."

Critical Thinking The growth of digital media as a source of information has reduced the ability of children to critically evaluate the information they are exposed to, says Professor Patricia Greenfield, director of the Children's Digital Media Center at UCLA. Critical thinking skills are crucial in helping students achieve more than a cursory understanding of any topic and helps them form their own opinions. Reading requires a person to think and process information in a way that watching television may not. The more you read, the deeper your understanding becomes of what you are reading and its application. Greenfield tells parents to encourage their children to read and should read to their children. Developing writing skills can help you strengthen your ability to make reasoned arguments on a variety of subjects, which is useful in school and on the job.

Improved Communication Skills Improving your reading and writing skills also goes hand in hand with developing your communication skills. The more you read and write, the more you broaden your vocabulary and are able to articulate concepts accurately and more effectively to others. Increasing your ability to communicate also helps make you a better worker or student.

More Opportunities Studies show that people with advanced reading and writing skills have more opportunities in school and professionally than those who do not develop these skills. Children who are avid readers will often find school more appealing. Literary readers are more likely "to engage in positive civic and individual activities--such as volunteering, attending sports or cultural events, and exercising" than non-readers, according to the NEA study.

Soource: http://www.ehow.com/

Recently Uploaded Documents

Application for Admission to Nursery Schools
Application for Admission to Primary Schools
National Schemes for Secondary Schools

Parents Information

School Education System
COVID19 - In Effect
Find a School

List of All Schools

All Schools

Student Scholarships

University of Guyana

Ministry of Public Service

Role of School Welfare Officers

Child Advocacy and Empowerment
Community Outreach and Linkage
Counselling and Consultation
Implementation of Social Work Programs
The Role of Schools Welfare Officers

Placement Information

Application for Transfer based on Higher Marks
Application for transfer from area of residence
Application for Transfer to a School with a lower Cut Off Score
Guidelines and procedures for the placement of students at the various levels of the Education System.
Guidelines: requesting Funds for Graduation and acquisition non-budgetary of Funds and Donations
Monitoring for compliance with the placement rules at Nursery, Primary and Secondary Schools
Placement at Nursery and Primary Schools
Placement in the Secondary Schools
Placement of students who are Re-migrants, Children of Diplomats and Students from Local Private Schools
Policy On Admittance To Nursery And Primary Schools
Procedures for Placement in the Georgetown Education District
You are here:

The Importance of Reading Essay in 100, 150, 200 & 500 Words

By Vijay Gupta

Updated on: April 28, 2023

Today, I’m going to write the importance of reading essay in 100, 150, 200 & 500 words. That means if you’re looking for an essay on the importance of reading, you have come to the right place.

Firstly, I’ll write the essay with headings so that you can write it comprehensively. After that, you will get to see the essay in 100, 150, and 200 words.

Hence without wasting your valuable time, let’s start writing the importance of reading essay.

See the short essay on my ambition of life .

Table of Contents

The Importance of Reading Essay with Headings in 500 Words

1. introduction.

Reading is the best practice whether it’s about reading a book or anything else. You get benefits in both situations.

Reading not only improves your thoughts but also develops your perspectives.

By reading, people’s mind moves towards positivity and serious thoughts. It actually changes the way you see the world. Reading keeps your mind more active than others. It also gives you knowledge about many things.

Reading anything is helpful. When you start taking interest in reading, your creative ability starts developing.

It prompts you to focus on the right path instead of choosing the wrong path. Overall, you can’t get such pleasure as you get in reading.

That’s why reading is very important in people’s life.

See also the essay on newspaper .

2. The Importance of reading

The importance of reading is as much as eating for living, that’s why its importance cannot be neglected.

When a child goes to school, he starts learning things related to his life. There, he tries to learn all the things that can enhance his understanding. At the same time, he tries to be creative. That is, the mind of the child starts developing by reading.

Overall, reading not only instills self-confidence in a person but also benefits him in many ways such as increasing knowledge, developing communication skills, reducing stress, etc.

Whenever a person gets into the habit of reading, he brings concentration to his studies. Reading more about a particular subject makes you more considerate and wiser than others. As a result, you’re able to explain right and wrong to anyone.

3. Changes after you start reading

When you start reading more, it starts changing your behavior, body language, perspectives, etc. You try to go deeper into what you read and start questioning. Overall, your perspective begins to change compared to others.

Reading makes you very strong not only creatively but also imaginatively. Also, it makes you mentally strong.

The more active you are in reading, the quicker you will be able to think things.

By reading more, you are able to do even the most difficult tasks very easily and patiently. It gives you such strength and confidence that you cannot get from anywhere else.

Reading initiates a vertical change in you that you cannot imagine.

4. Conclusion

If you have the habit of reading, surely you will have better knowledge than others, so if you don’t have the habit of reading, you should include it in your daily routine whether it is about reading books or anything else.

Reading for 30 and 35 minutes a day can take you to a higher level. So, I suggest you read whatever you love to read on a daily basis. It will always give you the advantage whether it is a matter of success or a bright future.

Reading books or other things will make you more relaxed than spending your free time.

Also, read the essay on Swachh Bharat Abhiyan .

The Importance of Reading Essay 200 Words

Reading is such a habit that can make anyone socially and mentally strong. It not only gives knowledge but also inspires us to uncover good thoughts.

Not all but there are still some people who like to read. When you get used to reading, your mind becomes sharper and more active than others.

Good reading always benefits you. Whatever you read gets set in your mind and when you remember it, you get many more new ideas.

Reading is also a kind of brain exercise that strengthens your mind.

While studying, you forget your past and future and always remain in the present. Also, it makes your memory better than others.

When someone gets inclined towards reading, he starts thinking in a new direction with a new beginning. At the same time, self-confidence starts growing inside and creativity starts improving.

Reading books or anything else is such an investment the benefit of which you get to see in the future. That’s why you all should include the habit of reading in you so that you can build a good society by spreading positive thoughts.

Read also, essay on social media addiction .

The Importance of Reading Essay 150 Words

Reading is so important in one’s life that without it one cannot gain knowledge. It increases stability, intelligence, and positivity in people’s minds.

Reading has been considered a good practice not from today but from the olden times. Today’s educated and employed people are good examples of this.

All of them have reached this point by reading books and proved how important reading is in our life. By reading books, people can easily utilize their time, avoid negative thoughts, achieve the goals set by them, etc.

Additionally, reading can easily raise the status of living. Actually, it brings changes in your language, style, attitude, vocabulary, etc. So, whenever you feel stressed or bored, you can read whatever you like.

As reading good books enhances knowledge, similarly reading newspapers and novels open your mind. Additionally, you get a vivid view of the surroundings.

By reading, your mind becomes calm and in one direction, due to which your concentration increases and you become smarter than others.

The Importance of Reading Short Essay 100 Words

A few people have the habit of reading. Those who have, understand its importance very well. The habit of reading is considered one of the good habits because by reading well you not only get knowledge but also get new vocabulary.

There can be many reasons for reading, but the main reason is to fill yourself with knowledge. You cannot get deep knowledge from anywhere except books.

It’s believed that the people who are fond of reading, their working style, intellectual ability, and creative ability are completely different from common people.

That’s why reading is very important. It’s really a very good way to de-stress yourself.

Final words

Eventually, I hope that the article must have proved to be very helpful for you. Now, you will have no problem writing the importance of reading essay.

If you really liked this article, please share it with those who need it.

Vijay Gupta

Hello everyone, My name is Vijay Gupta and I belong to a very small town that is situated in district Hardoi, which is in Uttar Pradesh. 1. Education – I’ve completed my primary education from a private school that is situated in my hometown and upper primary, matric and higher secondary education have been completed from a government college. Well, I was an average student till class 5th, but I accelerated my preference towards studies from class six. Consequently, I passed out many classes with good positions. Even I passed out 12th with good marks ( 405/500 ) and topped my college. Due to getting good marks, I got a cheque of 500 rupees and was rewarded by the Principal of my college. After completing my 12th, I prepared twice for IIT ( Indian Institute of Technology ) from Aakash institute, but unfortunately, I failed to get selected into the best IIT colleges. But during the preparation, I was being graduated from CSJMU Kanpur. I completed my graduation in 2016 and now I’m pursuing an educational degree ( B.Ed. ). 2. Profession – Although I love teaching, but I also do blogging. Both are my favorite jobs.

bsf ro rm syllabus Pdf 2024

Easy Access to SRKR Syllabus PDF

labour inspector syllabus pdf download

Punjabi University Syllabus Pdf

ctet syllabus 2023-24 pdf download

ssc gd syllabus 2023-2024 in hindi pdf download

Nursery Class Syllabus PDF Download

ktu syllabus Pdf 2023-2024

Skip to main content
Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Your Health

Treatments & Tests
Health Inc.
Public Health

Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning

Jonathan Lambert

A close-up of a woman's hand writing in a notebook.

If you're like many digitally savvy Americans, it has likely been a while since you've spent much time writing by hand.

The laborious process of tracing out our thoughts, letter by letter, on the page is becoming a relic of the past in our screen-dominated world, where text messages and thumb-typed grocery lists have replaced handwritten letters and sticky notes. Electronic keyboards offer obvious efficiency benefits that have undoubtedly boosted our productivity — imagine having to write all your emails longhand.

To keep up, many schools are introducing computers as early as preschool, meaning some kids may learn the basics of typing before writing by hand.

But giving up this slower, more tactile way of expressing ourselves may come at a significant cost, according to a growing body of research that's uncovering the surprising cognitive benefits of taking pen to paper, or even stylus to iPad — for both children and adults.

Is this some kind of joke? A school facing shortages starts teaching standup comedy

In kids, studies show that tracing out ABCs, as opposed to typing them, leads to better and longer-lasting recognition and understanding of letters. Writing by hand also improves memory and recall of words, laying down the foundations of literacy and learning. In adults, taking notes by hand during a lecture, instead of typing, can lead to better conceptual understanding of material.

"There's actually some very important things going on during the embodied experience of writing by hand," says Ramesh Balasubramaniam , a neuroscientist at the University of California, Merced. "It has important cognitive benefits."

While those benefits have long been recognized by some (for instance, many authors, including Jennifer Egan and Neil Gaiman , draft their stories by hand to stoke creativity), scientists have only recently started investigating why writing by hand has these effects.

A slew of recent brain imaging research suggests handwriting's power stems from the relative complexity of the process and how it forces different brain systems to work together to reproduce the shapes of letters in our heads onto the page.

Your brain on handwriting

Both handwriting and typing involve moving our hands and fingers to create words on a page. But handwriting, it turns out, requires a lot more fine-tuned coordination between the motor and visual systems. This seems to more deeply engage the brain in ways that support learning.

Shots - Health News

Feeling artsy here's how making art helps your brain.

"Handwriting is probably among the most complex motor skills that the brain is capable of," says Marieke Longcamp , a cognitive neuroscientist at Aix-Marseille Université.

Gripping a pen nimbly enough to write is a complicated task, as it requires your brain to continuously monitor the pressure that each finger exerts on the pen. Then, your motor system has to delicately modify that pressure to re-create each letter of the words in your head on the page.

"Your fingers have to each do something different to produce a recognizable letter," says Sophia Vinci-Booher , an educational neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University. Adding to the complexity, your visual system must continuously process that letter as it's formed. With each stroke, your brain compares the unfolding script with mental models of the letters and words, making adjustments to fingers in real time to create the letters' shapes, says Vinci-Booher.

That's not true for typing.

To type "tap" your fingers don't have to trace out the form of the letters — they just make three relatively simple and uniform movements. In comparison, it takes a lot more brainpower, as well as cross-talk between brain areas, to write than type.

Recent brain imaging studies bolster this idea. A study published in January found that when students write by hand, brain areas involved in motor and visual information processing " sync up " with areas crucial to memory formation, firing at frequencies associated with learning.

"We don't see that [synchronized activity] in typewriting at all," says Audrey van der Meer , a psychologist and study co-author at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She suggests that writing by hand is a neurobiologically richer process and that this richness may confer some cognitive benefits.

Other experts agree. "There seems to be something fundamental about engaging your body to produce these shapes," says Robert Wiley , a cognitive psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "It lets you make associations between your body and what you're seeing and hearing," he says, which might give the mind more footholds for accessing a given concept or idea.

Those extra footholds are especially important for learning in kids, but they may give adults a leg up too. Wiley and others worry that ditching handwriting for typing could have serious consequences for how we all learn and think.

What might be lost as handwriting wanes

The clearest consequence of screens and keyboards replacing pen and paper might be on kids' ability to learn the building blocks of literacy — letters.

"Letter recognition in early childhood is actually one of the best predictors of later reading and math attainment," says Vinci-Booher. Her work suggests the process of learning to write letters by hand is crucial for learning to read them.

"When kids write letters, they're just messy," she says. As kids practice writing "A," each iteration is different, and that variability helps solidify their conceptual understanding of the letter.

Research suggests kids learn to recognize letters better when seeing variable handwritten examples, compared with uniform typed examples.

This helps develop areas of the brain used during reading in older children and adults, Vinci-Booher found.

"This could be one of the ways that early experiences actually translate to long-term life outcomes," she says. "These visually demanding, fine motor actions bake in neural communication patterns that are really important for learning later on."

Ditching handwriting instruction could mean that those skills don't get developed as well, which could impair kids' ability to learn down the road.

"If young children are not receiving any handwriting training, which is very good brain stimulation, then their brains simply won't reach their full potential," says van der Meer. "It's scary to think of the potential consequences."

Many states are trying to avoid these risks by mandating cursive instruction. This year, California started requiring elementary school students to learn cursive , and similar bills are moving through state legislatures in several states, including Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and Wisconsin. (So far, evidence suggests that it's the writing by hand that matters, not whether it's print or cursive.)

Slowing down and processing information

For adults, one of the main benefits of writing by hand is that it simply forces us to slow down.

During a meeting or lecture, it's possible to type what you're hearing verbatim. But often, "you're not actually processing that information — you're just typing in the blind," says van der Meer. "If you take notes by hand, you can't write everything down," she says.

The relative slowness of the medium forces you to process the information, writing key words or phrases and using drawing or arrows to work through ideas, she says. "You make the information your own," she says, which helps it stick in the brain.

Such connections and integration are still possible when typing, but they need to be made more intentionally. And sometimes, efficiency wins out. "When you're writing a long essay, it's obviously much more practical to use a keyboard," says van der Meer.

Still, given our long history of using our hands to mark meaning in the world, some scientists worry about the more diffuse consequences of offloading our thinking to computers.

"We're foisting a lot of our knowledge, extending our cognition, to other devices, so it's only natural that we've started using these other agents to do our writing for us," says Balasubramaniam.

It's possible that this might free up our minds to do other kinds of hard thinking, he says. Or we might be sacrificing a fundamental process that's crucial for the kinds of immersive cognitive experiences that enable us to learn and think at our full potential.

Balasubramaniam stresses, however, that we don't have to ditch digital tools to harness the power of handwriting. So far, research suggests that scribbling with a stylus on a screen activates the same brain pathways as etching ink on paper. It's the movement that counts, he says, not its final form.

Jonathan Lambert is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance journalist who covers science, health and policy.

handwriting

The Surprising Benefits of Early Reading

Early reading for pleasure is linked to enhanced thinking, feeling, and acting..

Updated May 9, 2024 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina

Research into children who start reading for pleasure at an early age, shows notable brain enhancement.
Reading for pleasure between 2 and 9 supports healthy development in a variety of brain regions.
Reading rather than screen time is connected to better cognitive, mental health, and behavioural outcomes.
Reading offers children a proven way to reduce anxiety and depression.

In 2023, researchers in the United Kingdom, at the universities of Warwick and Cambridge, and others in China at the University of Fudan, published results of the data they analyzed from over 10,000 teens gathered from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development cohort in the United States.

Their focus was not academic. They were not trying to see who read the earliest and tested the best. They studied children who read for pleasure and how it improved their brain function if they began between two and nine years old, started after that time, or did not read for pleasure at all. The study was cross-sectional. The researchers collected data from many different teens at a single point in time. They were from diverse socio-economic backgrounds in families that had a whole range of educational levels.

The study was longitudinal. They assessed the over 10,000 adolescent participants over a series of years. Furthermore, a “2-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis for potential causal interference was also performed.” While the study revealed “moderately significant heritability of early” reading for pleasure “with considerable contribution from environments,” the brain differences were found to be causally connected to those children who started reading for pleasure early in life.

This major dataset showed that children who start reading early, for the sheer pleasure of it, develop brain structure in such a way that they improve their thinking skills, mental health, and conduct. They show signs of reduced stress , as well as reduced tendencies towards aggressive behaviours such as bullying .

Imagine children excited to go to school because their peers are joyfully turning the pages of stories rather than seeking opportunities to target, humiliate, and harm. Imagine for teachers a classroom where their students have healthy brains, facility with thinking and learning, and a capacity to self-regulate both internalizing and externalizing behaviours. In other words, their students aren’t withdrawing, disengaging, feeling anxiety and depression . Their students aren’t aggressively lashing out or breaking rules.

Twelve hours a week of reading for pleasure, started early in life, could potentially transform today’s classrooms into spaces where education comes alive and mental health issues are significantly reduced. It might even save many teachers from burnout .

The more children read early, the less time they are on screens which has been shown to change the way their brains develop. The early readers for pleasure showed distinct improvements in their brain development as documented on brain scans. The impacts were notably positive for children’s verbal learning, memory , speech development, and overall academic performance. The impacts were also notable for improvements in mental health and behaviour.

The Research

The Warwick, Cambridge, and Fudan researchers put their study into the context of an extensive meta-analysis of other studies. What they add to our understanding is the significant connection between early reading for pleasure and enhanced brain health versus the correlation between screen time and “multiple psychopathological problems” ranging from externalizing behaviours like bullying, and internalizing ones like depression and anxiety, and learning challenges like ADHD .

Not only are structures in the brain linked specifically to reading impacted, other brain regions, such as “the middle frontal, temporal pole, circular insula, left superior frontal” and more, were positively associated with cognitive or thinking performance. Just as important, the positive impact on so many brain regions were also associated with reducing “psychopathology scores.” If we want children and teens to succeed at academics and avoid the sometimes lifetime curse of mental illness and mental disorders then encouraging and facilitating early reading for pleasure is one critical intervention. The improved health of these brain regions didn’t just slightly improve cognition and mental health outcomes, they “significantly mediated” them.

To put these research insights more forcefully, specific brain regions impacted by early reading for pleasure, among the many identified, “play critical roles in cognitive function.” This is vitally important to lay a foundation for learning that underpins academic success. At the same time, these findings show “abnormal pathological dysfunctions/defects and alterations in these brain regions are significantly related to multiple psychiatric and mental health disorders.”

There is that powerful word once again “significantly.” It is not used lightly by scientific researchers who are cautious to overstate their findings.To recap, if we prioritize children’s early reading for pleasure and keep them away from screen time as their brain is developing intensely, we not only give them an enhanced foundation to academically achieve, but we may also help protect them from the immense suffering and loss frequently connected to mental health disorders.

Early Reading for Pleasure is Protective

Research shows that children who spend time with care-givers reading in early childhood suffer less from social-emotional problems. Children who are reading for pleasure, rather than interacting with screen content, suffer less depression and aggression . They disengage less. They have less anxiety. They are less likely to develop ADHD. They don’t bully as much or break rules as frequently.

Why? Is one activity morally better than the other? Is reading the ethical choice and screen time a "bad" choice? Not according to this research. Because reading for pleasure enhances many brain regions associated with thinking and emotions and mood and behaviours, it is a prescription for success and mental health.

If children cannot see properly, we are quick to get them glasses. If children cannot hear effectively, we get them hearing aids. When they cannot walk, we get them crutches or a wheelchair. If children are struggling to think clearly, problem-solve, develop social- emotional intelligence , behave in regulated, empathic ways, we need to get them reading for pleasure, the sooner the better.

If children are struggling to avoid acting with cruelty and aggression, if they struggle to be motivated, engaged, and happy, we need to supply them with books so that they can learn to read for pleasure. We need to surround them with caregivers who read to them, show them pictures, say words out loud, tell stories until they reach that moment when children are keen to read for pleasure on their own. These children become teens who read rather than are addicted to screens.

If we are a society that intervenes when eyes need support, when ears need enhancement, when legs require rehabilitation, recovery, or assistance, then the research encourages us to become a society that prevents pressing mental health issues, strives for all to have educational and career success, and reduces bullying and aggression by intervening on behalf of brains and brain development.

As one of the study’s researchers, Cambridge psychiatry professor Barbara Sahakian explains: “Reading isn’t just a pleasurable experience – it’s widely accepted that it inspires thinking and creativity , increases empathy and reduces stress. But on top of this, we found significant evidence that it’s linked to important developmental factors in children, improving their cognition, mental health, and brain structure, which are cornerstones for future learning and well-being.”

Sun, Y., Sahakian, B., Langley, C., Yang, A., Jiang, Y., Kang, J., Zhao, X., Li, C., Cheng, W., & Feng, J. (2023). Early-initiated childhood reading for pleasure: associations with better cognitive performance, mental well-being and brain structure in young adolescence. Psychological Medicine.

Jennifer Fraser, Ph.D., is an award-winning educator and bestselling author. Her latest book, The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health , hit shelves and airwaves in April 2022.

Find a Therapist
Find a Treatment Center
Find a Psychiatrist
Find a Support Group
Find Online Therapy
International
New Zealand
South Africa
Switzerland
Asperger's
Bipolar Disorder
Chronic Pain
Eating Disorders
Passive Aggression
Personality
Goal Setting
Positive Psychology
Stopping Smoking
Low Sexual Desire
Relationships
Child Development
Self Tests NEW
Therapy Center
Diagnosis Dictionary
Types of Therapy

At any moment, someone’s aggravating behavior or our own bad luck can set us off on an emotional spiral that threatens to derail our entire day. Here’s how we can face our triggers with less reactivity so that we can get on with our lives.

Emotional Intelligence
Gaslighting
Affective Forecasting
Neuroscience

Trending Now
Foundational Courses
Data Science
Practice Problem
Machine Learning
System Design
DevOps Tutorial
English Essay Writing Tips, Examples, Format
List of Important Essay Transition Words You Should Know
What is Article Writing? Objective, Format, Samples & Tips
Email Writing - Format and Samples
10 Best Practices For Writing Documentation
How to write a Business Letter? | Steps and Format
Importance of Sports for Students in English
Important Tips on How To Prepare for the GRE
12 Best ChatGPT Prompts for Academic Writing Assistance in 2024
7 Best Tips for Keyword Optimization in SEO [2023]
CBSE Class 10th Maths Important Topics and Chapters for 2024 Board Exam
Why Writing Skills Are Important For Students?
A Guide to Writing an Essay for Job Interviews
Tips for Writing a Research Paper
Why Reading Code is More Important Than Writing?
What is Content Writing? 10 Best Tips for Great Content Writing
Article Writing Format: Objective and Steps
How to Write a Cover Letter in 2023?
SAT Preparation Tips & Tricks 2023

Important Tips for Writing TOEFL Essay| Tips 2024

The TOEFL iBT test is a good way to show you know English well enough for university. The test has four parts: reading, listening, speaking, and writing. It takes about three hours to finish. The last part, the writing section, has two essays: one independent and one integrated.

The integrated essay lasts 20 minutes and is based on a reading and a listening passage, similar to a typical school setting. You need to remember what you heard and explain the ideas in your own words without copying. In this article, we will give you some really helpful tips to improve your TOEFL iBT writing skills.

How to write a good TOEFL essay?

Tips for Writing a Good TOEFL Essay

Create an essay plan.

Having a plan for your TOEFL iBT essay can make your writing flow better and help you organize your ideas. Writing down a short essay plan before you start will help you use your time well. When you know what you will write next, you won’t have to stop and think between each paragraph.

There are several common TOEFL iBT essay plans that work well. However, the most important thing is to find what works best for you. An organized plan is essential to succeed in the TOEFL iBT writing test because it helps the examiner follow your essay easily. Even if you have great ideas, a disorganized essay can make it hard to get the grades you deserve.

Know What the Examiner Wants

Check the writing rubrics for the TOEFL iBT writing test and set a goal for the grade you want.

The writing rubrics show what the examiner expects from your TOEFL iBT essay. This can help you focus on important skills like organization and clarity.

You can find examples of TOEFL iBT writing test essays with estimated grades online. These examples give you a good idea of what to aim for when practicing. Knowing what the examiner is looking for can make you feel more confident in your writing.

Give Yourself a Word Limit

A good TOEFL iBT essay should have at least 150 words for the integrated task and 300 words for the independent task. However, it’s up to you to decide.

Setting a word limit helps you know when to stop writing and start checking your essay. This also forces you to focus on what is essential, leading to a higher grade. In writing your TOEFL iBT essay, quality is more important than quantity.

Stick to the Prompt

Under pressure during the TOEFL iBT exam, it’s easy to go off-topic.

After each paragraph, quickly read what you have written to ensure it is relevant to the essay prompt. This will save time because you won’t have to rewrite at the end if you realize you strayed from the topic. It also helps you plan the next paragraph.

With limited time, it’s best to stay on track throughout the TOEFL iBT writing test. This is especially important for the independent writing task but is also useful for the integrated writing.

Keep on Practising your Writing

More Practice is key for the TOEFL iBT writing test as it improves both your writing skills and speed. The more you write, the more confident you will feel during the exam.

Becoming good at writing doesn’t happen overnight, so practice is essential. Spending 30 minutes on a sample TOEFL iBT essay regularly will help you improve. By practicing often, you will retain your skills and become familiar with the essays, making them less intimidating during the test.

Also, it’s important to time yourself when you practice.

Use Effective Paragraph Structure

Paragraphs are the building blocks of your essay. Each paragraph should start with a clear topic sentence that ties into the main idea of the essay. Support your main point with evidence and examples in each paragraph. Make sure each paragraph flows smoothly into the next by using transition words and phrases to link ideas and create a cohesive essay.

Use Specific Examples

To score high on your TOEFL essay, use specific examples to support your ideas. Include real-life examples, statistics, and facts to back up your arguments. This shows your knowledge of the topic and your critical thinking skills. Specific examples also make your essay more interesting and help you stand out from other test-takers.

Use Varied Sentence Structure

Vary your sentence structure to make your essay more engaging. Mix short and long sentences, questions, and statements to add variety. This will help avoid repetition and keep your writing interesting. However, ensure that your sentences are grammatically correct and fit well in the context of your essay.

Use Academic Vocabulary

Using academic vocabulary makes your essay sound more professional. Choose words that are suitable for the academic level of the test. Avoid slang, casual language, and overly complex words. Make sure you use words correctly and understand their meanings.

Use Correct Grammar and Punctuation

Correct grammar and punctuation are crucial for a high score on the TOEFL writing section. Ensure you use correct verb tenses, subject-verb agreement, and sentence structure. Use appropriate punctuation to make your writing clear and easy to read. If you’re unsure about any grammar or punctuation rules, look them up or ask a tutor for help.

Integrated Writing Task

Transition words and phrases.

Transitional words and phrases are crucial and should be used in TOEFL essays. Transition between contrasting points of views in both readin and listening passages are important:

Integrated Essay Time Breakdown

10 amazing toefl writing tips.

Here’s a quick summary of our top 10 TOEFL Writing Tips:

Tip 1: Pay close attention to the reading passage because the listening passage will challenge each point made in it.
Tip 2: Practice taking brief but accurate notes during the listening passage. You only get to hear it once.
Tip 3: Paraphrase the passages. The TOEFL grading criteria include vocabulary, and you will earn zero points if you simply quote the material.
Tip 4: Use lots of transitional words and phrases to help develop your essay and connect your ideas.
Tip 5: Manage your time wisely. You only have 20 minutes to write an essay of at least 250 words.
Tip 6: Add to the discussion. Do not repeat points and ideas from the passages in your response.
Tip 7: Stick to a few simple verb tenses.
Tip 8: Try to include multiple sentences with more than one clause.
Tip 9: Plan to edit your essay for at least one minute at the end. There is no spellcheck on the TOEFL.
Tip 10: Practice writing at home and ask a teacher or trained TOEFL expert to give you a grade and point out your weaknesses.

TOEFL Full Form – Eligibility, Exam Pattern, Benefits
TOEFL Exam Pattern 2024: Check Question Types & Scores
TOEFL Eligibility 2024: Age Limit, Qualification, Docs & More
TOEFL Preparation Tips & Strategies 2024
TOEFL Exam 2024: Fees, Syllabus, Dates, Registration & More
TOEFL Exam Registration 2024: Check Dates, Fees, Processes, Centres & More
TOEFL Speaking Score: Percentiles, Score Calculation, Score Range, and Score Rubrics

How to write a good TOEFL essay- FAQs

What is the format of the toefl essay.

The TOEFL essay is a 30-minute written task where you are asked to express and support your opinion on a specific topic. The essay is typically four to five paragraphs long and should include an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

Where can I find sample TOEFL essays to practice with?

You can find sample TOEFL essays in TOEFL preparation books or online. The official TOEFL website also provides sample essays and scoring guides.

How can I prepare for the TOEFL writing section?

To prepare for the TOEFL writing section, you should practice writing essays using sample prompts, develop your grammar and vocabulary skills, and learn how to organize and develop your ideas effectively. You may also want to work.

How to write a TOEFL essay?

To write a TOEFL essay, it is important to understand the prompt, brainstorm ideas, create an outline, and then write a well-structured essay with an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Practice organising your thoughts and expressing them clearly within the time limit provided.

Is 27 a good writing score in TOEFL?

Yes, a score of 27 is considered a good writing score in TOEFL. It demonstrates a high level of proficiency in writing and indicates strong language skills, coherence, and clarity in expressing ideas.

Please Login to comment...

Improve your Coding Skills with Practice

What kind of Experience do you want to share?

IMAGES

Essay on Reading is a Good Habit
The Importance of Reading
Understand Why Is Reading Important & Know 20 Benefits of Reading
Ten Amazing Benefits of Reading Books Fine Art Print. Multiple
The Importance Of Reading Books Free Essay Example
6 Ways Reading Benefits Your Brain, According to Science

VIDEO

10 Benefits of Reading, Why You Should Read Every Day
Why We Should Read Books
Why Reading is So Important for English Learning
Benefits of reading/ EWM/ Learn English #education #englishlanguage #didyouknow
The Benefits of Reading Books #english #essay #shorts
10 Lines Essay On Importance Of Reading Books

COMMENTS

Essay on Benefits of Reading (1300 Words)
3 - The benefits of reading. Reading is the best way to learn new things, broaden your knowledge, and find inspiration. It also stimulates your brain. Reading can help you keep your mind sharp and be in control of it. Reading in different genres helps you develop different skills in different ways.
Importance of Reading Essay
1. Empathy towards others 2. Acquisition of qualities like kindness, courtesy. 500+ Words Essay on Importance of Reading is provided here to help students learn how to write an effective essay on this topic. They must go through this essay in-depth and then try to write their own essay.
The Symbiotic Relationship Between Reading and Writing
When writing dries up or stalls, the best way to revitalize it is to feed your brain with more reading. Reading may be compared to eating the nutrients we need for the energy to write. Reading feeds the writer with ideas for structure, rich language, literary moves, and compelling ways to illuminate a writer's purpose.
Benefits of Reading: Positive Impacts for All Ages Everyday
Reading is the most effective way to get information about almost everything and is the key ingredient in learning for school, work and pleasure. On top of this, reading boosts imagination, communication, memory, concentration, and empathy. It also lowers stress levels and leads to a longer life.
How Reading Will Help Your Writing and Add Pleasure to Your Life
Reading expands your concentration and your vocabulary. Reading exposes you to different writing styles. Reading helps you to subconsciously absorb syntax, grammar, style, and punctuation. Reading helps you to subconsciously absorb generic conventions, structure, and document design. Reading gives you increased insight and inspiration.
The Mental Health Benefits of Reading
Reading fiction has been found to improve one's social cognition and ability to empathize with others. New research finds that reading programs can support youth mental health through conversation ...
Reading and Writing for Understanding
Reading, writing, and understanding. The relationship among reading, writing, and understanding is clear. Students engaged in reading-to-learn will also be prepared to write well. In turn, students who are engaged in writing-to-learn will become more effective readers. Through both approaches, students will gain a better understanding of ...
Essay on Importance of Reading: Samples in 100, 150 ...
Essay on Importance of Reading: Samples in 100, 150, and 250 Words. Language learning requires four skills i.e. Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing. It is an important part that eventually builds up the communication skills of a person. Reading will help in attaining knowledge of variable fields.
Why Reading is Essential for Improving Essay Writing Skills
Entwining reading and writing in the classroom. For those in education looking to improve their students' essay writing skills, there are a few ways reading and writing can be taught together for the most benefit to the student. Note-taking is the easiest way to aid students in their reading and writing skills.
1.1 Reading and Writing in College
Table 1.1 "High School versus College Assignments" summarizes some of the other major differences between high school and college assignments. Reading assignments are moderately long. Teachers may set aside some class time for reading and reviewing the material in depth. Some reading assignments may be very long.
Reading is Good Habit for Students and Children
500+ Words Essay on Reading is Good Habit. Reading is a very good habit that one needs to develop in life. Good books can inform you, enlighten you and lead you in the right direction. There is no better companion than a good book. Reading is important because it is good for your overall well-being. Once you start reading, you experience a ...
'Writing Directly Benefits Students' Reading Skills' (Opinion)
Writing brings the author and his or her skill to life. Students who write are better, more observant, and appreciative readers in general. And students who read are better, more competent writers ...
10 Benefits of Reading: Why You Should Read Every Day
9. Tranquility: In addition to the relaxation that accompanies reading a good book, it's possible that the subject you read about can bring about immense inner peace and tranquility. Reading spiritual texts can lower blood pressure and bring about an immense sense of calm, while reading self-help books has been shown to help people suffering ...
The Importance Of Reading And Writing Skills
Academic writing and reading skills allows us to analyze and respond in the correct formulated manner. To academically write well, one must master the correct reading skills. While reading, it is important to look for contextual clues, infer about the facts being read, and digest the main ideas. For some individuals, their reading skills may be ...
Reading empowers: the importance of reading for students
Remember, reading empowers! If parents are not encouraging their children to read independently, then this encouragement has to take place in the classroom. Oscar Wilde said: "It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.". The importance of reading for students is no secret.
What is academic writing and why is it important?
Academic writing is imperative for students. It is necessary for practical purposes, as students will need to write essays for tests like TOEFL, IELTS, and the SAT, college applications, and then many more once they reach college. Upon graduation, at whatever job they have, they will have emails, reports, presentations, and speeches to compose.
A Critical Resource: The Importance of Literacy Skills
Many schools emphasize reading catch-up alongside basic writing skills: grammar, structure, and mechanics. While these skills are certainly important, educators must prepare for advanced writing matters, including intensive workshopping and revising, should students want to claim greater fluency over their literacy abilities. "Schools with ...
The benefits of reading
These benefits are often found to be independent of family background. The impact of shared reading on literacy is unique. Among home learning activites such as parental help with reading and writing, playing music or learning the alphabet, only shared reading has a positive influence on literacy assessment at the end of Reception.
The Lifelong Benefits of Reading: How Books Can Transform Your Life
Social Benefits of Reading. Reading is often seen as a solitary activity, but it can also have social benefits. When we read a book, it opens up opportunities for conversation and connection with others. Book clubs, discussion groups, and literary events provide spaces for like-minded individuals to come together and share their thoughts and ...
What Are the Benefits of Essay Writing?
3. You improve your writing skills. Essay writing allows you to put your talents to the test. You can improve your overall writing ability and confidence by routinely practicing writing. When you write an essay, you become familiar with mechanical writing skills, such as grammar, spelling, and punctuation, which are critical in all forms of ...
6 Scientific Benefits of Reading More
Here are six scientific reasons you should be picking up more books. Reading reduces stress. Reading (especially reading books) may add years to your life. Reading improves your language skills ...
5 Reasons Reading is So Important for Student Success
The American Pediatrics Association reports that reading when young - even infants being read to by their parents - increases academic success down the road. However, many children enter kindergarten without the skills needed to read well. Helping students bridge that skills gap falls to those who have trained to become elementary school ...
Research and teaching writing
Writing is an essential but complex skill that students must master if they are to take full advantage of educational, occupational, and civic responsibilities. Schools, and the teachers who work in them, are tasked with teaching students how to write. Knowledge about how to teach writing can be obtained from many different sources, including one's experience teaching or being taught to ...
How Does Writing Fit Into the 'Science of Reading'?
Writing is intrinsically important for all students to learn—after all, it is the primary way beyond speech that humans communicate. But more than that, research suggests that teaching students ...
Benefits of Reading & Writing Skills
Improving your reading and writing skills also goes hand in hand with developing your communication skills. The more you read and write, the more you broaden your vocabulary and are able to articulate concepts accurately and more effectively to others. Increasing your ability to communicate also helps make you a better worker or student.
The Importance of Reading Essay in 100, 150, 200 & 500 Words
The Importance of Reading Essay with Headings in 500 Words 1. Introduction . Reading is the best practice whether it's about reading a book or anything else. You get benefits in both situations. Reading not only improves your thoughts but also develops your perspectives. By reading, people's mind moves towards positivity and serious thoughts.
Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning
Writing by hand also improves memory and recall of words, laying down the foundations of literacy and learning. In adults, taking notes by hand during a lecture, instead of typing, can lead to ...
The Surprising Benefits of Early Reading
Research into children who start reading for pleasure at an early age, shows notable brain enhancement. Reading for pleasure between 2 and 9 supports healthy development in a variety of brain ...
Important Tips for Writing TOEFL Essay| Tips 2024
Here's a quick summary of our top 10 TOEFL Writing Tips: Tip 1: Pay close attention to the reading passage because the listening passage will challenge each point made in it. Tip 2: Practice taking brief but accurate notes during the listening passage. You only get to hear it once.
Common Fallacies in Speaking and Writing … and What to Do about Them
For best results, before reading this essay and doing the exercise, go to the first essay "How an Ugly Duckling Became a Swan," then read each succeeding essay. Expository (non-fiction) speaking and writing are almost always about trying to affect the audience's opinion or perception of something.