Why it’s Important to Reply to Other Writers’ Stories

And it’s not to gain more followers

You will find articles on Medium encouraging writers to engage in other writer’s work to gain followers. While this is true, there is one crucial advantage to commenting on other people’s stories.

Consistently reading and replying to stories will allow you to practice your comprehension skills. Formulating a response to someone’s work forces you to pay attention to what you’re reading. Comprehension is the ability to understand the meaning behind a story.

The Texas Eduction Agency describes comprehension as:

The concept of reading as the application of a set of isolated skills such as identifying words, finding main ideas, identifying cause and effect relationships, comparing and contrasting and sequencing. Comprehension was viewed as the mastery of these skills.

When we think of reading, we usually think of books. However, as an adult what we read is often more than just books. We read emails, contracts, forms, applications and so much more. Not everything is written in the same form, flow, or ease as our favourite novels and can be quite difficult to comprehend. Developing the skill of comprehension gives you the strategies you need to be a better reader.

I remember the passage of stories I had to read as a child and answering the questions that followed. I was always suspicious of some of the questions since there was always one or two that seemed like a trick question. Comprehension goes beyond the halls of school. It is an important tool to help us decipher what others are trying to communicate which is necessary in helping us lead successful lives.

A good story requires quality research. Comprehension skills come in handy when interpreting different bodies of work to incorporate in your story. This helps you become faster at reading and filtering through the important messages you need to use in your story.

Along with the many articles on Medium encouraging engagement to grow your following, there are articles of success stories on people who write every day. I’ve mentioned my struggle with writing every day in my previous article, Writer’s Block Isn’t Real.

I felt pressured to the same. I kept thinking I needed to bust out a finished article every day to keep up with this goal. However, the point is to just write every day and replying to comments is writing!

The benefit of writing every day is to create a habit. So when you feel uninspired or ‘blocked,’ you have the discipline to keep going. I believe this is what those articles are encouraging us to do.

You not only practice your comprehension by reiterating what you understood from what you read but by replying to stories you are adding to your word count for the day. It’s like trying to achieve ten thousand steps in a day. Yes, you’ll likely get a chunk of those steps during your daily walk but don’t discount all the little steps in between that add up.