18/06/2020 – Reading the Text Out Loud

There are these articles on the internet with titles such as ‘How To Edit Your Novel Like A Pro!’ and most of them are filled with tips that would make anyone who’s been writing for a while roll their eyes. I picked up one piece of advice from one of these articles that was invaluable. I’ll save you the time of reading the articles and just tell you: read your text out loud.

By reading your text out loud to yourself, you spot errors and pick up on sentences which don’t scan correctly. If you stumble whilst reading your text, is there a reason for that? Could you phrase something so it reads with more clarity?

I love this advice. I’ve been enacting it since Three Arachnids in a Warship and it’s dramatically improved my editing skills. That being said, in my experience, it had one specific limitation: you can’t do it too many times.

I’m in the process of writing a short story for a publication owned by someone I get on with (it’s not what you know). I finished the story, I sent it out for feedback, I implemented the feedback and I then read the story out loud to myself. I ended up completely re-writing most of the first page because the way it was written was a little awkward. I then left it alone for a bit and came back the next day to read it out loud again.

The second read-through was important, because I spotted five errors I’d missed the first time around. Proof reading, it seems, is another of those things that is never completed, only abandoned. I was noticeably less efficient with my reading the second time around, however. I have problems with concentration because of my health, maybe I should have left the text alone for longer, but I have deadlines.

The idea of reading an 80,000 word novel out loud to yourself can seem daunting. It did to me, when I first heard this piece of advice, but take it from someone who has tried this on multiple novels now: It’s absolutely worth it.