Read Your Work Aloud
Chapter 21’s Main Takeaway: Reading your work aloud is an outstanding way to edit. It involves the ear, which is a wonderful editor and is more sensitive to mistakes and less easily fooled than the eye. An even better option: Have your work read to you, especially by your computer.
“After all my years of teaching and being taught, I am convinced that there is only one specific, consistently reliable tip writers in training can be given: read your stuff aloud, if not literally, then with an inner voice attended to by the inner ear. It is the only sure way to spot the clinkers, the rum rhythms. The merit and effectiveness of the practice stems from this link between the written and the spoken word.” – Ben Yagoda
This chapter is an extension of the editing section, but it’s important enough that I thought it should have its own voice. (Readers of the first edition of this book have cited this as one of their favorite chapters, as well as one of the most helpful, in the entire book.)
Reading aloud can be a valuable editing technique. The more important a writing project is, the more important it is to read the project aloud. Remember, your written words should have the same sounds and cadences as your spoken words. What’s the best way to ensure this? By listening to what you’ve written.
There’s more than one way to accomplish this task:
1. You can read aloud as if you were reading to someone else. Silent reading activates the internal ear—the voice in your head. But reading aloud activates the external ear, your hearing. We tend to be better judges of good writing when we hear it read. We’ll also find more errors when we read aloud; our ears are more reliable than our eyes. (There are such things as both optical illusions and auditory illusions. Likely, you are more familiar with optical illusions, because they are much more common. The eyes are more easily fooled than the ears.)
2. Have someone read your work to you. The advantage of this is that your mind is free to listen—you are not burdened with the actual task of reading. Pay attention to the sounds of the words and sentences. Does everything flow? Is the reader struggling with certain sentences due to construction flaws or lack of clarity, or is the reader easily handling the task?
3. Consider, yes strongly consider, having your computer read your document to you. This is a new and effective editing technique. In at least two ways, it’s more effective than listening to a friend read or reading the material yourself: 1) Especially when working with a long document, you or a friend might become fatigued from reading aloud, but a computer never will, and 2) as Ian Stables explains: “The brain can assume that missing words are there. It can also miss spelling mistakes. However, software will say it as it is. It won’t assume anything.”
So you may be surprised when hearing the computer read that “Shamma Rae listened to her favorite Norah Jones’ songs on her devise while she ate a piece of pie for desert along with a cup of coffee” doesn’t sound right. Your eyes may have missed it, but your ears won’t. You’ll need to change “devise” to “device” and “desert” to “dessert.”
It’s also easy to mistype small, common words like “or.” You may type “on” by mistake, and you may then have a difficult time identifying that mistake. That’s because “or” and “on” look very similar, especially when they are buried in the middle of a sentence. But they don’t sound so similar. Listening to your computer read your document will make it an easy catch.
The benefits of using an electronic narrator go beyond just identifying misspelled words: you can hear the cadence and rhythm of the writing. Do the words flow? Do they sound natural? Do they sound like you?
Reading aloud also helps you identify excessive word repetition. If you’ve been overusing a certain word, you may not discern this while you’re reading, but those repetitious words will jump out at you when you hear them read.
I recently started listening to my work electronically, and I can’t stress enough how helpful it is. One of the most draining aspects of editing is to create the voice in your head as you read. You are mainly editing the sound, the sound of the voice in your head, and not the look of the words on paper. For instance, upon reading a passage that needs some tweaking, an editor doesn’t say, “that doesn’t look right,” but rather, “that doesn’t sound right.” The editor has to create the voice while reading and then listen to that voice.
Creating the voice is taxing; it takes tremendous concentration. How much easier to edit when the voice is already there! The editor’s work is essentially reduced to one-
The program I use is called NaturalReader. You can download a version at www.naturalreaders.com. There is a free version, which does a good job, as well as various levels of paid versions, which come with extra perks. Just paste in your text, or open your document, and play. It’s really that simple.
One advantage of the paid versions is that they include an MP3 converter. By converting your file to MP3 format, you can download that file to your mobile device and listen anywhere. My favorite NaturalReader voice is Hazel, who speaks with a British accent. Hazel sounds both pleasant and reasonably realistic, and the rhythm of her reading is usually spot on.
There are two ways to edit using a program like NaturalReader. The first is to listen while the voice reads your document to you. The second is to listen while simultaneously reading the text on the NaturalReader screen. NaturalReader highlights both the sentence and the word being read, so you can easily follow along. In this way you can also check punctuation, formatting, and other aspects of your document. If you do this, you’ll also be using your eyes; so make sure your eyes don’t dominate: keep your ears attuned to the words.
One of my favorite writing instructors, Richard Andersen, is a strong proponent of reading out loud while editing. He writes: “Proofread out loud. When we proofread, we tend to rely almost exclusively on our eyes. Few of us realize that our ears are also reliable editors. Read out loud what you have written; listen to the way it sounds. If it does not sound the way you sound when you speak, change it. The closer you can bring your written prose to your speaking prose, the more authentic and less artificial it will be. Proofreading out loud, as students in the City University of New York writing centers have discovered, automatically eliminates 60 percent of your grammatical errors.”
Do you find it hard to believe that your ears are more reliable editors, and less easily fooled, than your eyes? If so, please notice the following, which is text with jumbled letters that most people have little or no trouble reading:
Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
As much of a mess as that is, it’s surprisingly easy to read, isn’t it? But write those words into a text-
If you were fascinated by your ability to read those jumbled words, as most people are when they first try, please notice the text that follows, which is a combination of letters, numbers, and symbols. Oddly enough, the eye can normally handle this too:
7HIS I5 3V3N M0R3 F4$C1N4T1NG 70 R34D, B3C4U53 !T C0N741N5 NUM&3R5 4ND 5YM30L5. BU7 Y0U C4N $T!LL R34D !T. 4M4Z1NG! — 4UTH0R D4V1D KL31N APPR00V3$ 7H15 M355AG3.
Amazing! Again, the point: Your ears are more exacting and less easily fooled than your eyes. Rely on them.
When you are evaluating something important, how do you go about it? Say, perhaps, you are considering buying an article of clothing. Don’t you examine that garment in as many ways as possible? You may look at the quality of the stitching. You may use your fingers to feel for thickness and softness. You may consider the brand’s reputation. You may hold the item up to other items to see how the colors match. You may try it on and look in a mirror. And then you may get the opinions of others, including nearby strangers. The more ways of checking, the better.
It’s the same with editing your work—the more angles you examine it from, the better. Reading your material aloud is just one more way to make sure that your writing is vibrant, rhythmic, and accurate.
I leave this chapter with a true-
For a year or more a commercial played repeatedly on our favorite television stations. It was one of those “you can better yourself if you take a training course with our company” commercials. The spokesman began his statement by saying: “I seen a commercial on TV . . .” Typing that just now, my word processor's grammar checker flagged that as bad grammar, but the producers of the commercial obviously did not. Anyway, it grated on my nerves for many months, and finally I let fly and corrected the man. (Of course, that marks me as the crazy one, because I’m pretty certain he didn’t hear me.)
The point is that while the eye has a tendency to adjust to and eventually overlook grammatical mistakes, the ear does not. Each time the ear heard that blunder it sounded worse. The ear is not fooled: it’s precise, it’s picky, and it’s a wonderful editor. By all means, employ it! The eye and the ear, together, make a great editing team.
End Quote:
“Hear me now or regret it later: Everything you write must be read aloud. Once all the context items are in place, this is the final test for any written piece . . . Do not neglect your sense of hearing in the process of writing and reading. As a longtime teacher of English as a foreign language, I can tell you on good authority that you have been listening to the English language at least five or six years longer than you have been writing and reading. And, most probably, your ears also had eighteen or more years of familiarity with the language before you began to read or write with a writer’s sensibility. For these reasons, your ears know when things sound okay, good, beautiful, strange, awkward, or just plain bad, before your eye can pick up on such things . . . Your written voice should burn with the fire of fervent prayer, soothe like a friend’s voice during a late-
This is chapter 21 from my book, Write With Your Speaking Voice, in its entirety. It’s a reader favorite, and one of my favorites too. I highly recommend applying its advice if you want to be a better writer.