The Compound Interest of Reading

If you want a conversational opener for your next dinner party, try this one on for size.

“A child reading for pleasure is a better predictor of their maths progress at sixteen than their parents’ education.”

That’s one that’s bound to get people talking! And it’s exactly what the research of Sullivan and Brown found. Their study shows that reading for pleasure comfortably beats parental background as a predictor of academic progress. And before I hear “well, clever kids just do more of everything, don’t they?”, they checked for that too. Playing a musical instrument did precious little. The effect they found is specific to reading. Not any other sort of enrichment or activity.

Reading.

Their work highlights that reading isn’t something we should keep in the nice-to-have slot we leave until after the serious activities are done and dusted with. Reading needs to be treated as a foundational activity upon which everything else is built. And the most important thing underneath it all is the least glamorous word in education: volume.

So, not just reading, but reading lots and lots. Because the more of it a child does, the better their chances of success later in life. And, of course, in true Matthew effect style, the more of it a child does, the more of it they CAN do. And on and on.

In the middle years of school, the least keen readers get through around a hundred thousand words a year. The keen ones connect with a million. That’s a tenfold gap, every year, compounding, and it’s a deficit no occasional afternoon intervention or inspirational assembly is ever going to out-run.

And one of the key reasons this advantage compounds is that reading is where the rare words live. Mol and Bus found that children’s books carry three times as many uncommon words as television or adult conversation. And the share of a child’s language that reading explains doesn’t sit still as they grow, it climbs. From about a tenth in the early years to a full third by university.

The hole gets deeper the longer it goes unfilled.

And, crucially, the link between reading and skill is strongest for the weakest readers. The boy who’s behind is the boy a reading habit would rescue. He’s also, obviously, the boy reading least. But volume is a tap you can turn on whenever you want. We just need to do it.

If I were to sit down and design the most useful intervention I could for a struggling boy, I wouldn’t reach for any sort of reading programme at all. I’d just get him reading a large volume of something he chose himself. And I’d give him as much of it as he wanted. No matter what it was. That’s it.

Now, that should be the part of what I’m saying that ought to make traditional publishing get ever so excited. Because we already know a place where boys are doing exactly that, and for free.

On Royal Road.

That’s a place where volume reading is the be-all and end-all. Mother of Learning, the serial fantasy I mentioned in my last article, runs to roughly two thousand nine hundred pages, and yet boys inhale it. And then they start the next one, in a genre that measures its hits in millions of words.

Whatever else anyone thinks of LitRPG, a boy four serials deep is banking the exact compound interest that Stanovich, Mol and Bus, and Sullivan are all pointing at.

Incidentally, Scholes suggests why this might be happening online and not in the open. She calls boys like these Clandestine Readers. They love reading and hide it, because the peer group has shown them that reading is a goody-goody activity that makes them seem soft. So they ration the thing they enjoy to keep the social cost down. A paperback announces itself across the playground whereas a phone open on Royal Road is completely illegible to the boy two seats over.

Nevertheless, regardless of where they’re doing it, the compound interest of volume reading is accruing. We’re just refusing to read the statement.

Sources

• Alice Sullivan and Matt Brown, ‘Reading for Pleasure and Progress in Vocabulary and Mathematics’, British Educational Research Journal, 41.6 (2015), 971–91.
• Keith E. Stanovich, ‘Matthew Effects in Reading’, Reading Research Quarterly, 21.4 (1986), 360–407.
• Suzanne E. Mol and Adriana G. Bus, ‘To Read or Not to Read: A Meta-Analysis of Print Exposure from Infancy to Early Adulthood’, Psychological Bulletin, 137.2 (2011), 267–96.
• Laura Scholes, ‘Clandestine Readers: Boys and Girls Going “Undercover” in School Spaces’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 36.3 (2015), 359–74.
• Vel Woven, ‘You Are Not Alone (Just Niche)’, Royal Road Forums (2025).