Reading is a remarkably fundamental and crucial prerequisite to having a sound education. It is a vital tool that the individual can use to help them make sense of themselves and the world around them.

Reading can help in so many other areas of learning and life. There have been many times in which what have I read has influenced how I write. I may have seen an unfamiliar word used by an author and either looked it up in the dictionary to learn what it meant or used the context cues available in the author’s work to deduce its meaning, acknowledging how it was used in the sentence. Then, just like that, I added it to my vocabulary of words I could use one day.

This same principle applies to sentence construction involving words you’re already familiar with but that didn’t know could be put together in a certain way until you saw it done by a valid source.

Though a variety of other factors could stand in the way of an individual being a great public speaker, if you are well read, you will have a rich library of vocabulary words and constructions available to pull from when writing a speech or speaking extemporaneously.

Being well read can help significantly with comprehension in most any subject you’ll encounter in education and beyond.

Because of all this, I would like to strongly commend Victoria Elementary School and Kenbridge Elementary School for their efforts to promote reading to their students through various events. In Victoria, students took part in the school’s annual Character Day Parade, which fit in nicely on Halloween but used books as source material for all the characters.

As Dispatch Staff Writer Emily Hollingsworth wrote in her story about the parade, both Victoria and Kenbridge elementary schools have held a series of activities and events meant to encourage children to become enthusiastic about reading, including schoolwide readings of “Charlotte’s Web” by E.B. White and hosting the “Reading under the Stars” event, which took place at Victoria Railroad Park Oct. 11.

Titus Mohler is sports editor for The K-V Dispatch and Farmville Newsmedia LLC. His email address is Titus.Mohler@KVDispatch.com.