The most famed quote from the essay is "reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man." Bacon further aligns reading with "delight" in privacy, and admonishes readers to "weigh and consider" rather than to "take for granted" or "contradict and confute." In other words, the "full man" will be one who is discerning, literate and open-minded. The effect of reading, Bacon believes, is not to fill a vacant mind to but illuminate a darkened and ignorant one. Reading does not cram a closet, but opens its doors.
"Conference" -- Bacon's term for debate and discussion -- "maketh a ready man," in that the experience makes a student ready to argue his own point of view. If he debates often, he will defend himself with proofs and logic rather than simple emotions -- what Bacon's calls "ready wit," tiresome surface ideas that are quickly exhausted. Reading is still Bacon's focus, however: he returns again and again to the activity in his discussion of conferencing, noting, perhaps satirically, that reading even helps "the lawyer's cases."
Of writing, Bacon actually says precious little, except to note that "if a man write little, he had need have a precious memory," suggesting that writing sets down permanently a man's wandering and changing thought processes. Writing becomes, for Bacon, an external index for the ideas that reading internalizes. Again, he cannot keep from returning to reading as the central focus, since writing after reading, for Bacon, is itself a focus "if a man's mind be wandering."
Bacon does not advocate study at the expense of living; on the contrary, he notes that "too much time in studies is sloth" and that studies are worthless "except that they be bounded by experience." For Bacon, life does not support studies; it's the other way around. He urges at several points that reading, writing and conferencing are there to enrich life and experience, which is why "wise men use them."