“Reading matters much more than writing”—Barbara Liskov #writing #protip

The above quote is from the below video, which I’ve been watching as background research for some client work:
The Power of Abstraction – YouTube

Liskov is a very highly regarded computer scientist, and in that sound bite I used as the title she’s talking about programming (in a great deal of detail that is largely inscrutable to me, just yet), not books of any sort. But I believe what she says here applies to *all* writing, from fiction and creative essays to workaday ad copy and stereo instructions. My sound-biting also makes it sound like she’s saying that reading (e.g., to expand your own knowledge) is more important than creating new stuff. Although I *also* believe that, she’s actually saying something different. Here’s the pertinent bit of her talk, in its entirety (from around 17m37s into the video):

“I think it’s much more important to make programs easy to read than it is to make them easy to write, because you write a program once and you yourself have to read it over and over again, other people have to read it, and eventually someone else maintains it. Reading matters much more than writing”

In other words, hers is a strictly–and gloriously–Utilitarian claim: For the good of the many, our focus (as people-writing-things) should not be on expressing that which we want to express, but in expressing things in a way most thoroughly intelligible to readers.
Depending on what kind of writing you think of as “writing” (and the value you place on “self-expression” *shudders*) you may believe something very different than this. That’s nice. But regardless of how you feel about this approach, I *can* tell you from personal experience that when you set your mind on writing for longterm readability (rather than self-expression), you get paid better, have a *much* easier time selling your creative work, and people generally like you more.