The trifecta of reading, writing, and speaking represents three interconnected and absolutely foundationally essential skills in the realm of communication and language development. Together, they play a pivotal role in education, professional success, and personal growth. In order to write well, one must read well, and in order to speak their own words well, one must also both read well and write well. Doing so has always been and will always be essential for the aspiring or actual philosopher.
Obviously, outside of perhaps the deaf or mentally impaired, we all speak. To other individual people and rarely under special circumstances in front of audiences or if professional, in front of audiences on a regular basis. However, what far too many folks, and even well educated college graduated folks, really dont do that much of, is read. After assignments in college, the reading slows, and then into work life we only read for work related purposes or in small doses of what we see on our phones. Which will not suffice.
When we say "foundationally essential to the philosopher" we mean throughout their whole life. Speaking, reading, and writing and many dont want to hear this, but that means we should be reading books, on the regular, our whole life. "Gulp" or "Ugh!" people say... because reading a book, especially a more dense one, is work and not leisure. Sure there are trashy romance novels out there which are essentially narrative softcore porn, and there are plenty of garbage disinformation books as well. A great documentary can be vastly superior to a bad book, but as a whole, the depth of books is much more vast than the depth of what one gets from the screen. With either fiction or nonfiction. It's common knowledge that when a book is adapted into a film the book is always better than its stripped down more lite screenplay equivalent. Because the medium of pros - words on a page allow, as a whole, for a deeper well to pull and comprehend concepts from, while also increasing vocabulary, acquiring knowledge, and to inspire critical thinking.
When one finishes their work day it's much more common to want to watch than read a book isn't it? The wife and I are both hard working professionals and we are known to sit down and watch a show in a larval like state, just like many couples in their evening time. I've always read almost exclusively non fiction and she's almost exclusively always read fiction here and there, but as of late, her ratio of reading to watching has biased way more toward reading and at the time of this recording, she oftentimes prefers to spend her evenings reading now reading over watching some so so long drawn out show that half way through you wonder why you're still watching and question the time commitment you have already invested in it.
Reading is the input, and writing and speaking are output. A realistic ratio is that one likely has inputted, meaning read, 100x more than they will write. So in order to write well, and well often, one must be constantly reading. Column, articles, essays, research papers, books, novels, etc... The good news is, and we'll devote a future insight into this, is that due to technology, reading can also now mean text to speech or audiobooks which allow for the potential to increase the amount of time one can read because they allow for more of a multitasking dynamic. As listening is something you can do while gardening, or commuting, etc... Because we have spent 20+ years listening to non fiction audiobooks, that has allowed us to now spend the last 5+ years writing essays and are now also moving into these shorter insights. And there's no way we could have done that, or even think of writing feature length screenplays or novels without a prior long history of reading, and then writing, and then speaking. This trifecta represents a powerful set of skills that are integral for empowering the individual to express themselves, acquire knowledge, engage with others, navigate the complexities of modern life, and build up a unique body of work. Because if you input well, you will output well.