The Benefits of Reading Aloud During the Editing Process

Reading aloud when proofreading and editing is excellent practice because far fewer errors escape our notice.

I teach my students to do it. I recommend other authors and bloggers do it. And even though I have been teaching English for 30 years, I know I am not infallible, so I still do it, too.

Renea Guenther

By this point, we’ve put so much work into our stories, we believe there couldn’t be anything left to handle.

The plot’s cohesive, the stakes are high, our characters are compelling, we’ve kept the reader interested to the end…

Everything is as it should be.

Then we edit.

Only to find our story doesn’t read as it should, things can be worded better, overused words and phrases that need to be cut or substitutions found…

Editing can be a huge mess, especially if you’ve never done it before.

It’s not always as easy as one might expect. Nor are the mistakes always obvious.

We know what we wrote and expect it to read as we remember it.

So we skim through our writing, catching a mistake here and there, but often missing key problems.

Our minds often fill in the blanks for missing words, especially in…

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2 thoughts on “The Benefits of Reading Aloud During the Editing Process”

I think this is a great idea. If I had read the first book for which I gathered stories of their lives as physically challenged artists would have been totally reworked by me before it got published. Now a number of them have passed on, and I have lost the interest in the book. It has never sold many copies, and I think the title too was responsible. Who would buy a book, Artful Alchemy: Physically Challenged Fiber Artists Creating?

We live and learn.

wordynerdbird says:

October 24, 2019 at 08:05

‘Artful Alchemy’ sounds fabulous!

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2 thoughts on “The Benefits of Reading Aloud During the Editing Process”

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