Why I read

I think one reason I read is because I can be kind of lazy. Now there's bad-lazy, like not doing anything, and there's smart-lazy. I think I fall into the smart-lazy category.

I found that reading helped me work smarter at school. So I had to do less work.

Here's how I think that worked: I liked to read stories. So I read a lot of them. That meant I did pretty well in reading class without having to work at it. In language arts class, I did well too. Why? Because reading all those stories made it easier for me to see without thinking too hard where the mistakes were in a sentence. I saw sentences in stories all the time that were well written. So I could tell what wasn't written correctly. It also helped me write my own sentences without as much effort as it would have taken if I'd not read all those books full of well written sentences.

I had to work a little harder in social studies. But it helped that I read because I saw history - which is a lot of what social studies is - as a kind of stories. A lot of stories, in fact. When I thought of it as stories, it was easier to learn.

This left me with more time to spend on the subjects I had to REALLY work at which were science and math. When I was a girl, those were the subjects people assumed boys were the best at, so maybe that's why I wasn't as quick in those classes. Fortunately that's changing now. But anyway, because I didn't have to spend as much time on the other subjects, I could work on my science and math to the point that I could, if I concentrated, get an A. Or a solid B, at least.

So that's how reading because I'm lazy ended up helping me in school after all.

Why do you read?