May 12 2008
Read What You Write Out Loud
You’ve probably heard this one before. But then again, you’ve also heard that you shouldn’t drink Diet Coke and eat French fries, and you still do it. So here’s another reminder of a writing technique that will help put your work in shape:
Read what you write out loud.
If you have to ask why this is important, you’ve never really done it. If you had, you’d know that reading it out loud and listening to what you’re reading reveals subtleties in cadence, tone and phrasing that you don’t “hear” when you only read your work silently in your mind. (One word of caution. People may hear you and think you’re talking to yourself. If this happens and they confront you, just laugh maniacally and tell them you’re a writer. They will understand and not bother you again.)
You can take this technique – and the benefits it delivers – even further by reading what you write into an audio recorder and then playing it back, listening carefully and making notes where something seems amiss.
Probably the best way to really “hear” your work is to ask someone else to read it to you. Another person will read it more as your audience would read it than you will, because you are, after all, the person who wrote it.
And if you don’t want to do the reading yourself, you can try a free program called yRead2 which will “read” a text file to you. The voice misses maybe the inflections you’d like, but it does give a good read.