Reading (much) more than I write
May 16th, 2007 A small maths exercise: consider a world with p people, where people read and people write. On average, each person writes w pages and reads r pages a day. How many readers will each page have on average?
We have to assume that the world is not eternal, otherwise, every book will have an infinite number of readers, over time. But over a finite period of time T, we can say that the number of pages read is prT, while the number of pages written is pwT. Therefore the ratio is simply r/w: all writers have on average as many readers as the proportion of the number of pages read over the number of pages written (on average in the population).
Fortunately, not everybody writes, which helps. But overall, I often think there are too many people who want to write and too few who are content with only the reading part. Just like there are too many people who want to be a famous singer, violinist or ballet dancer and not that many people who just want to be (paying) spectators.
The blogosphere is an extreme case where almost all write. We cannot deny some the right to write (contrary to the conventional publishing world), therefore the above r/w ratio is exceptionally valid.
What if I consider that a weblog article is not worth the writing effort if it cannot reach at least a thousand people? Then it means that I should read at least 1,000 pages for every page I write. Uh oh. I have to go. I have some serious reading to do.
Interesting! I like the way your post points out the value of people who read a lot but who don’t write — I blog, yes, but I don’t write and publish books, and read lots of them, so I’m helping other pepole with their ratios — in the print world at least.
Oh, oh, oh. May I steal this and use it in a presentation about our math division I have to do for the literacy editors at my company? And looks like I’ve got some serious reading to do, too. Maybe my end of the year reading analysis will have to have this ratio in it.
P.S. You are very brave to write a post that’s a math problem, given your audience.
Dorothy: if I do not count technical publications and corporate documentation, my r/w ratio in the print world is infinite. But in the cyber world, it is more somewhere around 100: I should read ten times more (or write ten times less).
Emily: please do steal it; but it’s hardly a math problem. At least by my standards.
To you, no, but to literacy experts, yes. If the literacy folks were to see a proposal that began, “Consider a world with ‘p’ people,” they would read no further and say, “give it to Emily. It’s a math proposal.” Thanks for allowing me to steal it. (Now I’ve just got to figure out the most clever way to use it.)
Early math literature used fewer symbols and more words. It looked more like today’s philosophy works, but it was very hard to read. I could have written: “the total number of pages read over a period of time is the number of people in the population multiplied by the average number of pages people read daily, and multiplied again by the number of days in the considered period”. This can just be written prT.
i’m reading, i’m reading!
And I should be reading more — I forgot to mention that my mathematical argument is not the reason why I should read. It is just a rational justification. The reason is that I simply love reading.
[…] how I said people should read much more than they write? Well, I am doing just that at the moment. That and write post upon post for my gardening blog. […]