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Essays

Why Do We Read?

Sean Moore

Writing is good design, expressed in words.

Blogs writers certainly can (and do) publish anything and everything under the sun to their respective websites. But does that mean they should? Not in an existential sense of course, but rather is publishing ephemeral interests in the best interest of the site, the readers, and the writers?

Answering that question unearths an even more fundamental sense of what drive authorship. After all, writers don’t write merely to write – they write to be read. Writing is the ego’s ultimate expression of vanity; pleasure for the writer does not arise from the mechanical act of writing, nor the intellectual act of expressing thought in language, but in the egotistical act of knowing others read and enjoyed the end work. So to truly assess the what of writing we must understand the why of reading.


With tiny snippets of text comprising Facebook posts, Twitter updates, and Tumblr reblogs, reading has been much maligned by more conservative observers, voicing their belief that literacy is being destroyed by these microscopic forms of writing. Yet this explosion in text compositions, however small, have at the very least dovetailed with an ever-expanding level of literacy the world over; if these two facts are not related, than at the very least the expansion of the written word from social networks has done nothing to harm reading and writing skills.

Perhaps more accurately stated, it is not the levels of literacy which are shifting, but rather the end goal for which reading and writing are now used. Literacy was until recently used to express, distribute, and preserve thought; the medium was in many ways an educational medium, either in the literal sense of essays and textbooks, or more subtly through fiction, literature, and poetry. In many ways, because of the web’s predisposition for text, writing and reading are now performing the duties previously assigned to speech; our eyes and fingers used to communicate what once was conveyed by mouths and tongues.

All that is a long way of saying that reading encompasses an ever-expanding realm of activities.We read to be educated, learning what others who have come before us have found to be true in the world. We read to be informed, having a grasp on the events and information that shape our world by the second. We read to be entertained, to be transported out of our world if only for a moment to be encompassed by an engrossing story. And perhaps most importantly, we read to be connected; to feel that we are part of a larger conversation.

Writing on a site should reflect this, then – of course it is difficult to express all of these qualities (along with many others) in a publication. It is not necessarily what topics are covered, but rather the how those topics are shared and examined. Writers should strive for consistency in tone – a single voice, well-written, can express many things, and will be taken seriously no matter the underlying theme.