This revelation and discovery I can’t claim for myself, it was suggested to me by a reviewer but has made a massive difference to my writing, and is possible the biggest (free) help I’ve found. It may sound blindingly obvious, but it’s an option I’d never considered, maybe arrogantly thinking myself ‘above the need’ but… I’m definitely not.
You know how you can re-read your own work dozens of times, checking for the smallest errors or typos, and become essentially snowblind to some things? If you expect a sentence to read a certain way, your brain will interpret what is on the page as being what you intended it to be. Despite numerous editing passes, I thought I’d take this advice and see what difference using ‘read aloud’ made (it is on the Review tab if you’re using Microsoft Word).
I’m now about 20 pages into a pass of one of my novels, and have stopped to write this so you get my instant reaction, which is a mixture of bliss and frustration at my crappy eyes and brain, and delight at being able to improve (what I thought was) a finished product.
Listening to the text being read to me, I’ve already found a dozen tiny typos, duplications and fixes that had previous been invisible to my proofreading of my own work. So, the frustration is the fact that despite my best efforts, there were still annoying little oversights and mistakes, the bliss is that the magic of computers and disembodied voices (which still have many amusing pronunciation foibles) are now making my books better, and that’s what matters the most. Even the one currently on sale I now realised to my shame, needs this treatment, and will be corrected in an amended ms later this week. I won’t ever again upload an ms without doing this first.
Editors are amazing, and perform a wide range of roles for an author, but they’re also (understandably) expensive unless provided by a publisher, and my now-best-friend read aloud Word voice (who I shall unimaginatively name ‘Wordy’) can at least help with one small function in the absence of an editor of my own. Thank you Wordy.
Stay safe,
Kit