This week, a short essay titled “The Golden Rule of Becoming a Better Writer” hit the front page of Hacker News, where it collected 377 points and 238 comments. The thesis, as the title suggests, is that the single most reliable way to become a better writer is to read as much as you can. The comment thread is full of agreement — the kind of nodding that happens when advice is both true and completely safe.

The advice is true. It is also, increasingly, moot.

The essay presumes a reader. That presumption is doing more work than anyone in that thread seems willing to admit. According to the National Endowment for the Arts’ own research office, 49 percent of American adults reported reading at least one book in the past year — down from nearly 55 percent a decade earlier. A 2024 study cited widely in education circles found that 54 percent of American adults read below a sixth-grade level. And in January, Fortune ran a piece with a headline that should have been treated as a national emergency: “Gen Z are arriving to college unable to even read a sentence.”

“Read as much as you can” is excellent advice for someone who can still read. For a growing share of the population, it is the equivalent of telling someone with a broken leg to run more.

The Advice Economy Is Selling Running Shoes to People With Broken Legs

The writing-advice industry — the Medium essays, the Substack newsletters, the creative writing programs, the craft books — has built an entire economy on the premise that the problem is insufficient reading. The problem is not insufficient reading. The problem is that the capacity to read deeply is being dismantled, and the advice-givers are the last people in the room to notice.

A community college English instructor I spoke with — in the faculty parking lot after a department meeting, where these conversations actually happen — put it plainly: “I stopped assigning novels three years ago. Not because I wanted to. Because the students would just… not read them. And I couldn’t fail everyone.”

That instructor is not a crank. She is the canary. The writing-advice economy keeps publishing essays about the importance of reading to an audience that is, statistically, less and less able to act on the advice. The people who can still read deeply are the ones who don’t need to be told to read more. They already do.

The Advice Has Become a Class Marker

Here is the thing the conventional take ignores. “Read as much as you can” is no longer universal advice. It is a class marker. It works for people who grew up in households with books, who attended schools that still assigned full novels, who have the attention span and the vocabulary to sit with a 400-page book. For everyone else, the advice is a reminder of what they never had.

The Hacker News thread is full of people who read. That is the point. The essay went viral among exactly the people who least need it. The 238 comments are a self-congratulation loop: people who already read a lot, agreeing that reading a lot is good. Meanwhile, the 54 percent of adults reading below a sixth-grade level are not in that thread. They are not reading the essay. They are not reading anything.

The writing-advice economy has mistaken its audience for the population. It is writing for the already-literate and calling it universal wisdom.

What Actually Needs to Be Said

The honest version of “read as much as you can” is not advice about writing. It is a policy problem. The decline in reading is not a failure of individual will; it is a failure of infrastructure. Schools that stopped assigning full books. Screens that trained a generation to skim. A culture that treats deep reading as a luxury rather than a prerequisite.

The essay is right that reading makes you a better writer. But the more urgent truth is that reading is becoming a privilege, and the people dispensing the advice are the ones who still have it. The next essay should not be about how reading improves your prose. It should be about what happens to a society when half of it cannot read a paragraph and the other half is too busy writing essays about the importance of reading to notice.

Sources