While writing this week, I felt like I was losing sight of the forest for all the trees in need of revising. I needed to get out of my head. So I decided to read it through out loud for a different perspective.

Have you ever tried reading your writing aloud? If you haven’t, I recommend giving it a try. It’s a useful proofreading technique because it (typically) slows down your reading speed, giving you more time to catch typos. But more than that, hearing the words out loud can also bring attention to writing habits you might not know you have. For instance, alliteration stands out more when spoken out loud, and repeated words are more obvious too. If your writing involves dialogue, it’s definitely beneficial to read that out loud, because if it doesn’t feel natural to speak your dialogue, you know you need to change something up.

But the best thing about reading aloud is that it quiets your inner editor, which means you can get a better sense of the flow of a piece, which can be hard to do with something you’ve read over and over again.