Should You Read the Book, or Listen to the Audio Version?
By: Renata Gomes
Tags: Writing, Self Improvement, Creativity, Books, Writing Tips

Should You Read the Book, or Listen to the Audio Version?

What you can learn from each format as a writer.

Finding time to read is part of a writer’s job, but what should you do when time is scarce and you want to increase the amount of books you’re consuming? Is listening to an audiobook acceptable, or is it cheating?

When reading, you decode a message, you make sense of words, sentences, punctuation. You’re learning how an author uses the elements of the written language to create a voice which manifests inside the reader’s mind.

Listening to an audiobook feels like cheating because you’re not decoding anything, you’re listening to a story read by someone else.

What makes audiobooks so appealing is precisely what makes them feel like cheating on your reading goals: how time-saving they are. Have you ever met someone without any visual impairments who sits on the couch with the specific purpose to listen to a book? I haven’t.

You don’t stop what you’re doing to listen to a book. You listen while driving, working out at the gym, or cooking dinner for the family. You listen to save time.

When you’re doing two things at the same time, however, you’re not paying full attention to either of them. When you read, you have to stop everything else you’re doing and focus exclusively on reading. That’s another reason why listening to an audiobook may feel like cheating.

For writers, if you’d have to choose between reading a book and listen to it, reading should be your number one choice. Reading shows you how language can be used to create certain effects. It gives you a better sense of sentence structure and paragraph length. It helps you understand how to use punctuation correctly, and how to build a unique voice.

If you already save time in your day to read, it can be helpful to take advantage of audiobooks to increase your content consumption and learn different things — as long as you’re mindful that listening while doing something else might decrease how much of the book’s message you retain.

Since you can’t see how the language is being used on the page when you listen, there are other elements of the book you should focus so you’re learning and improving as a writer.

Listening to an audiobook provides you with knowledge, if the book is technical; or with a sense of genre, plot and characterization, if it’s fictional. You can also get a good sense of how much content goes in each chapter, of where in the story you should place plot points and twists.

When listening to an audiobook, a writer should pay attention to all of the above plus dialog — those are the elements this format highlights.

In an ideal world, if you want to study good writing and proper use of language, you’ll read a book and then listen to its audio version. Decode the writing for yourself and then listen to how it sounds when it’s read out loud.

In the real world, where there’s so much content to consume and so little time to do it, you’ll want to make the best use of both written and audio formats to save time and gain knowledge.