Always Reading, Always Writing

I was recently thinking about what a huge proportion of my day is filled with reading and writing. I read newspapers, books for work and pleasure, magazines, journals, letters, documents, email, Facebook, other online websites and blogs, memos, signs, bulletin boards, and more. I write letters, postcards, emails, syllabi, lesson plans, tests and exercises, lectures, conference proposals and papers, articles, book chapters, books, manuscript reviews, tenure and promotion reviews, notes for committee work, my ubiquitous to-do lists, grocery lists, posts for this blog, and much more. I am thinking about the sheer amount of time I spend with words. I am sure this is true for many of you as well. It is hard to remember that for much of history, people spent little or no time on reading and writing, and even now, there are people all over the world, including in the United States, who cannot or do not read and write, or do so only very minimally. I don’t say that spending as much time as I do on words is necessarily a good thing, but it is a major fact in my life and work, and a very large part of who I am.