Jane Douglas discovered she could tell what — and how often — her students read based on how they wrote.
“It was like a party trick to help their writing out,” said Douglas, an associate professor at UF’s Warrington College of Business.
She wanted to do quantitative research on how lifelong reading impacts adults’ writing habits.
Douglas and Samantha Miller, a graduate student at UF, began the research in August 2015. They gathered cover letters and surveyed more than 120 UF graduate students, getting their average time spent reading various publications each week. They used two programs to evaluate the complexity of the students’ writing.
Though the individuals who scored highest on these programs read three to four hours outside of class, Douglas and Miller found what the students read was more important than the length of time they read.
Douglas said the concept of mimicry might explain why students who read publications such as BuzzFeed scored lower than those who read The New York Times.
She said she reads academic articles and The New Yorker “cover-to-cover.”
