<p>Reading more books to improve your writing skills is like listening to more music to improve your musicianship. Yes, it can help, but nothing beats actually practicing what you are trying to perfect.</p>
<p>Good writing is also about good editing. Good writers are also good editors of their own work. But when you are starting out it helps to have an editor/coach go over what you’ve written and give you pointers, suggestions, etc.</p>
<p>What dadx3 says.</p>
<p>As a writer and book author, I know that nothing improves your writing more than writing, writing, and still some more writing–which also includes editing. In fact, you have to learn to love editing if you want to improve. </p>
<p>You have to learn not to fall in love with every word you put down, but learn to love big fat Xes through your text. </p>
<p>Reading is great, but reading more will only make you a better reader, just like running through tires makes you good at running though tires but does little to improve your ability to elude tacklers on the football field. </p>
<p>I find that when I’m going through periods of intensive writing, I do very little reading, particularly material in any way related to what I’m writing. The tasks are just too dissimilar, and I fear the intrusion of unconscious influence from my reading. I find myself decompressing with a serious regimen of mindless TV.</p>
<p>Two clich</p>
<p>Not a book, but The New York Times. I am continually amazed at the quality of writing in the Times. The columnists produce what basically amount to brilliant essays every day, dozens in each day’s paper. A college applicant writing their application essay could do worse than studying the Times for inspiration.</p>
<p>I think to be a strong writer, you need to be a strong reader and in my opinion, a lover of literature but I read The NY TIMES every day from cover to cover, both objective reporting, cultural reporting and the editorials and op-ed pieces. I encourage you to write. If you enjoy reading a book or a story or a magazine article, you can begin practicing writing a response or some form of a book report. Both my daughters are very strong readers and one in particular a very strong writer. In fact she knows that her unique and exceptional essay helped get her into her college. The adcom member she met later on at a college event commented on it to her months after the fact.
Both girls beginning in second grade wrote responses to stories read in school. Older d, the lesser writer of the two was in a pull-out gifted program from grade 3-5. One of the elements of that program was reading classic literature at that upper elementary reading level - Black Beauty, The Secret Garden type of book, and doing a short form book report. The short form book report really helped her to learn how to express herself concisely and was a great help throughout middle school, high school, college and grad school. In fact I was so impressed that I shared the format used by the teacher of the gifted program with younger d’s fifh grade and sixth grade teachers.
In one of older d’s grad school classes, she had to write responses to very esoteric journal articles in critical art theory and she was so far ahead of most of the other students in her seminar because she had so much practice writing early on.
Also… reading other people’s essays are also really helpful and paying attention to teacher’s comments and responses. I am a very good proofreader and whenever either d brought home a graded paper, I found I would learn from teacher comments for errors that I might not have caught.</p>
<p>Instead of recommending some of my favorite essayists, I did some googling and came across [About</a> | Longform](<a href=“http://longform.org/about/]About”>Longform). When it comes to my favorite essayists, I read them, not because they are writing about subjects in which I am interested, but because they make the subjects they write about interesting.</p>
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<p>My colleagues who teach creative writing will say that you cannot really divorce reading and writing. They require a lot of reading in their classes in order to expose students to models. Students who take these classes and think that they are going to spend their time only writing are in for a shock.</p>
<p>Extensive reading requires writing students to absorb varied vocabulary, rhythms, and principles of sentence organization.</p>
<p>Don’t forget about magazines! The New Yorker and Atlantic both have some excellent prose, and the articles, while long, aren’t as long as a book.</p>
<p>Some of the very best books on writing:
Payne, The Lively Art of Writing
Zinsser, On Writing Well
Strunk & White, Elements of Style
Trimble, Writing with Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing
Tufte, Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style</p>
<p>I agree that you need to read and to write. If you don’t read a lot, you simply won’t know in your gut how words are used in English. I see this again and again in college essays that students post for comments–often, the thoughts are well-expressed, but there are multiple words that are used in ways that just aren’t normal in English.</p>
<p>As for creative writing classes, they aren’t all created equal. I had some (long ago in college) that were excellent, and some that weren’t. My daughter had very good experience with summer writing programs at Kenyon and Iowa, and mixed experiences with some other courses. You have to perform due diligence before you sign up.</p>
<p>I will give one plug–my son found CTY’s online “Crafting the Essay” course to be helpful in improving his writing.</p>