Want to be smarter? Read more!

Experience always results in learning. Experience in reading leads to more knowledge about reading itself. Not surprisingly, students who read a lot tend to read better (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1985). They don’t need to read better in order to read a lot, but the more they read, the more they learn about reading. The same researchers reported that students who read more also tended to have larger vocabularies, better comprehension, and generally did better on a range of academic subjects. In other words, reading makes people smarter.—Understanding Reading, page 190