Here’s what several months of reading literature will do to your writing quality.

I started reading literature seriously during my freshman year of high school, and I cannot emphasize enough how pivotal the experience was for me as a writer.

The first is an excerpt from an essay I wrote at the start of the 9th grade. The second is an excerpt from my final 9th-grade English essay—submitted just eight months and several great books later.

Imagine the world we’d live in if we forced all 14-year-olds to engage deeply with literature.