Reading Aloud

A very common writing/editing tip I run across a lot is to simply read your work aloud. This helps you, as the author, to gauge the flow of your words. It also serves to help with sentence length – if it takes more than one breath to read one sentence, then the sentence is too long. It also helps to let the writer know if the dialogue sounds natural, or not.

Once in a while I do a bit of reading aloud of my work for these reasons. But I don’t do it as often as I probably should.

Is it really helpful to do this all the time while editing a manuscript? Is this something I ought to be doing all the time, rather than only here and there?

What do you other writers out there think of this practice?

Scott Harper

www.scottharper.net