I know you're being facetious, but there's something to this. Both reading and listening are passive. They're indistinguishable from each other, but both are quite distinguishable from writing, or reading the way you would "read" a math or physics textbook (which involves very little of the activity of scanning words on the page and very much of the activity of scribbling stuff in a notebook and then staring at it for awhile).

Yep, this is basically what the "you wouldn't call watching somebody play a game playing" argument, which was mentioned in the article, boils down to.