Aloud

Once again, I’m in the reading aloud phase of editing my upcoming book, The Drop: Season Three. I’ve talked about this technique before, where you use one of your passes of going through the draft and reading the book out loud to yourself. I can’t emphasize how useful this technique is. Narrating is different from reading, when your eye betrays you and skips over errors, like a missing word, which your brain is more than happy to insert for you so you can keep on reading. I had to laugh at one error yesterday. My wife is from Minnesota and our kids make fun of her for pronouncing the word “bag” as “beg.” When reading the draft yesterday, I found a typo where I’d done the same with the word “bag.” An innocent mistake, but also kind of funny in the context of our family. Anyway, I’m only about a quarter of the way through this edit and already I’ve found at least a half-dozen mistakes I wouldn’t have found otherwise. Like I said: highly recommended editing technique if you’re a writer.