[notahacker]

Nobody's saying reading other good writing doesn't help in any way, they're saying that quantity read doesn't particularly correlate with quality of output. I mean, I doubt Shakespeare read as much good quality English writing as the average human today, but the quality of his visual imagery and wordplay is generally considered to be on another level (and at the other end of the scale, his plots were heavily borrowed from the relatively small corpus of histories and dramas he was exposed to, whereas many writers far more widely read and educated in tropes and genre conventions resolved not to use them and came up with more imaginative settings and storylines... ). Many very well read people are competent enough in the use of language but will never write prose other people particularly want to read.