After brain injury, neurorehabilitation assesses reading cognition: Can you identify letters? Words? Can you comprehend sentences, paragraphs, stories? They show little interest in pre-injury reading behavior.

In my quest to regain my reading comprehension, I, too, focused on cognition. Until recently, I hadn’t considered that cognition and behavior are two separate aspects of reading needing treatment, even though I’d identified reading as my primary stress-management skill and had brought up again and again that, as a writer, I needed to read novels.

The Lindamood-Bell method of visualizing and verbalizing restored my reading comprehension, but my reading behavior restoration has been ad hoc. Most clinicians didn’t recognize the latter’s effect on me as a writer.

Journalist Phil Rosen noted that “I felt the impact of [not reading fiction novels for six months during studies] on my writing — less thought to eloquence, more tersity and a greater emphasis on delivering news rather than crafting narrative.”

In looking for research on the impact of reading behavior on writing, I found almost nothing on adult writers; none on adults with brain injury. However, research on primary students provides insight. When University of Florida associate professor Yellowlees Douglas and graduate student Samantha Miller discovered strong correlations between the complexity of graduate students’ reading and their writing, Douglas said: "You’d think someone would have studied these effects in adults long ago, but we were astonished to discover no one had.”

Karunaratne and Navaratne in 2021 published a study on reading habits’ effect on writing skills for 15 girls and 15 boys in grade 3 and reoprted: “As per the outputs of the........

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