Polishing Manuscripts and Catching Errors with Text to Voice

One of the long-known editing tricks is to read the piece you are editing out loud to yourself. It can help you catch wrong words, awkward phrasing, homonyms, repeated words, repeated sentence structures, confusing punctuation, overlong sentences (like this one), etc. However, this can get tedious, and also, you do not always read what is on the page. Sometimes you read what you think is on the page. However, there is a trick to get around this. It used to be: have someone else read it. But now you can achieve some of that benefit by having the computer read it to you. Word does this, but so do many other applications.

In Word it is called “Read Aloud” and you can even choose the voice (male vs female) and vary the speed of read back. It makes it much more obvious when you think you wrote for example “It was a vast desert” and the computer reads “It was a vast dessert”. You were thinking sand. You typed apple pie. Spell check won’t catch it for you as you spelled it correctly. It’s just the wrong word. You can read the latter sentence 100 times and your brain will auto-correct without telling you and you will see ‘desert’ if that’s what you intended even if that’s not what you typed. The computer doesn’t care. It just says what is there.

Similarly, you will read the sentence the way you want it to read, even if you have missed punctuation. The computer reading your work aloud, however, highlights such errors quite clearly.

Anyway, this is just a brief one. But if you are trying to put that final polish on a manuscript, and your eyes are just glazing over and you can’t bring yourself to read it even one more time – why not have the computer read it to you. Then all you have to do is sit back and listen.

If you have other editing/manuscript polishing tricks please feel free to share them below!