Saturday, September 4, 2021

Reading Aloud to Improve Your Writing

 by

Scott D. Parker

I read Jay's blog from yesterday and I thoroughly enjoyed his bonus content where he posted a video of him reading a chapter of his latest work in progress. (I really loved that one of the characters shared my name.) 

Anyway, I loved it so much...that I did the same thing. 

It's a fundamental truth in writing that if you read your prose and dialogue aloud, you will hear errors your eyes miss. It'll also help your character to sound more natural. 

So, here you go: me reading a random chapter (actually the latest) of my current manuscript. And I'd like to challenge our fellow writers to do the same.

(Boy, did YouTube select an awkward image of me.)

1 comment:

Dana King said...

Excellent advise; I've done it on at least one draft per novel for years. Lately I have discovered a benefit to having Word read aloud to me: I can concentrate entirely on seeing that what I hear matches what i see on the screen. After several drafts, it's easy to read what you think is on the page rather than what's actually there. Word allows you to catch all of those. It's also handy for those whose eyesight isn't wat it used to be.