After I finish a draft of a post, I’ll read it out loud a couple of times. I find that reading my work out loud helps to improve how it’s written.
On this blog, I don’t often edit much. My goal (as you might know) is simply to publish every day—not to polish posts forever beforehand. For other work though, I might read it out loud tens of times.
There’s something humbling about thinking that you’ve nailed a piece of writing, only to stumble over every other sentence as you read it out loud. It helps you to write how you speak, and that’s the kind of writing I most enjoy reading. To hear it in the author’s voice.
To practice on a recent blog post though, I made a rough a ready recording to see where I stumbled. I did a couple of times, and I ended up just changing it a bit (in the spoken version only). Most of my blog posts are very short, so reading it took just a couple of minutes.
I have a note stuck to my display that says “make something every day and share it”, and whilst I share my writing and art every day, I thought I’d share this too. You can listen to it on the web for now, and I’ll update the post when it’s live on common podcast directories.
Listening back a couple of times, I can spot all of the places that I might change both how I wrote the piece and how I performed it in spoken-word. That’s why I love this blog though—it’s the cutting room floor for the things that I might publish later, inspired by posts.
If you read or listen to the piece, I’d love to hear about it—and if you’ve recorded spoken-word versions of your own writing, I’d love to hear about it even more (even and especially the rough cuts).