Readers of exclusively web-based content aggregators such as Reddit, Tumblr, and BuzzFeed have lesser writing skills than those that read academic journals, literary fiction, and, according to a new study.
The researchers studied a group of MBA students at the University of Florida to study how their reading habits shape their writing skills. According to the report from the International Journal of Business Administration, “students with the highest scores of syntactic complexity in their writing read academic journals more frequently than their peers.” Check it out:
The amount of time spent reading for adult writers may prove less influential than patterns of reading over longer periods of time, as adults have left behind the developmental stages where frequency of practice in reading can exert strong influences on writing, via either the acquisition of syntactic knowledge or of domain-based knowledge. Perhaps still more important, the duration of time spent reading mattered far less than the syntactic complexity of the majority of their reading.