It is hard to look at the tumor and not come away with the feeling that one has encountered a powerful monster in its infancy
Siddhartha MukherjeeRead
I think the cardinal rule of learning to write is learning to read first. I learned to write by learning to read.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Reading is essential for developing writing skills.
The quote emphasizes the foundational relationship between reading and writing. Siddhartha Mukherjee suggests that in order to become a proficient writer, one must first immerse themselves in reading, as it provides the necessary exposure to language, style, and ideas that influence one's own writing abilities.
Themes
ReadingWritingLearningEducationLiteracy
In practice
Example use cases
A teacher can use this quote to highlight the importance of reading in a writing curriculum.
More from Siddhartha Mukherjee
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One day, I had a patient who was going through chemotherapy who came to me and said, 'I'm going to go on with what I'm doing, but I need you to tell me what it is that I'm fighting.'
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Nearly every one of the genes that turns out to be a key player in cancer has a vital role in the normal physiology of an organism. The genes that enable our brains and blood cells to develop are implicated in cancer.
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It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America - a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance's link to cancer ignites a firestorm of public hysteria and media anxiety - one of the most potent and common carcinogens known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars.
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It felt—nearly twenty-five hundred years after Hippocrates had naively coined the overarching term karkinos—that modern oncology was hardly any more sophisticated in its taxonomy of cancer.
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He that teaches us anything which we knew not before is undoubtedly to be reverenced as a master.
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I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.
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Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time.
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Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.
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