The writer learns more than the reader
Sometimes, it is indeed better to give than to receive — but both could do.
Much has been taught in primary schools that children must learn the fundamentals of reading and writing towards a balanced literacy. The former is the process of acquiring information through perception of or decoding the written symbols. Meanwhile, the latter entails the process of educing what’s within by putting them into letters, symbols, and illustrations. Literacy, in this light, means the ability to read and write — a matter of communicative competence.
Well-settled is the principle that all sorts of extremes are bad. Too much input will overload the system and too much output will lead to emptiness and failure of function. There is a need to achieve balance between reading and writing. Here, the relationship is an obvious thing to note. No one can write without reading first and no one can read without a considerable knowledge of the system of writing. Such makes the two inseparable and coexistent.
Writing is a more complex and denser process than reading, to say the least. Becoming well-abreast of the system of writing makes the reader exert a lesser effort in the course. But writing is the drawing of something from the mind — the mind that has plenty of thoughts inside whom the writer needs to sort out before finally inking them in the paper. It is said many times that those who strive to write experience writer’s block. A kind of barrier or hindrance of not knowing where and how to start despite of being desperately eager to pen down what’s in mind. In this sense, writing becomes a lot more different and difficult as compared to reading.
We all struggle for right words. There are words that provide synonymous approach to a single idea.
A person who wants to express that, writing is more beneficial than reading has plenty of ways to discuss it. First, he needs to frame his perspective in words and pen them down. But there are words that provide synonymous approach to what a single idea represents. He intelligently chooses which among those words best captures his idea. He could also formulate his own phrase, a mantra, a saying, until he writes the sentence that explicitly lays his idea. Another, at this point, he is more or less baffled by each word he writes, or a sentence, that no matter how it sounds or how it looks for his foregoing piece, he has to eliminate those filth and polish his work. Such is the fashion of writing. Full of rigorous methods.
Hick’s law explains the point of this write-up succinctly:
The time it takes for a decision to make depends upon the number and complexity of choices.
Suppose, the writer is researching about the related literature on his topic. He has to sail in a vast ocean of scholarly papers. There are thousands of papers and hundreds of authors. He should read voluminous papers to steer the ship he is navigating at the rightest path he heads towards. As he reads, he educates himself on the topic. As he notes important details down, he is drawing the relevant knowledge for his paper. Such an exhausting work indeed. No wonder why many writers of their own theses halt midway. Choosing the relevant piece of literature is a decision based upon their number and complexity. Sometimes, those important details that the writer is desperate to look for are nowhere to be found or are meant for a purchase.
Going back, reading is gaining a supply of knowledge to feed the mind. Writing gives a twofold benefit: to supply knowledge and gain the same at its finest sense. As the writer strives, the totality of his ideas are not easily cascaded in his paper. There are premises that he may lack or may have failed to include. But such is writing. People suck, too, in self-expression. They lack language facilities. This write-up is no exemption to that.
What the reader reads is just the fraction of the writer’s intended concept.
To write well is an art. It is an active process of self-expression, in fact, hyperactive at times. To read, to think of it, is active, too, yet not as much as writing.
Writing is a profound workshop for the mind.
To test one’s learning is better done with pen and a blank paper. What has been acquired or gained is not fully measured by multiple choice test. In taking the bar exam for aspiring lawyers, a question is asked and the examinee has to write extensively in an essay format. He has his own rules in constructing his arguments and defending them. Of course, before he sat in a desk that is full of pressure, he has read enormous provisions of law and jurisprudence in his law school stay. The same truth holds in writing in general. The writer is free to write whatever comes out of his faculties. But he could do it better when he has read something.
It is not true that reading alone provides knowledge. Writing, too, has a promising role. At the point of writing, one will never know how much he has learned by not seeing it himself in a paper he has written. That sense of authority gives worth to the writer. There are times, the serendipitous encounter will happen — a surprising experience that it is indeed fulfilling beyond words.
The more one strives to share ideas to others through writing, the more one is benefited than the reader of the work. You should write. Now.
