One More Time

It seems like I say this every time I do it and I’m going to say it again. One more time. If you’re writing something that’s going to be professionally published, maybe something like a book, it’s well worth the time to read it aloud. To yourself. To someone else. You will find so many things to remedy along the way. The main items I find useful are flow and repetition, which you don’t notice when reading in a regular, silent fashion. I can’t count the number of times I’ve changed wording because what’s on the page doesn’t sound right, like the way a person talks or how I describe a scene. Wrong word usage sticks out. When a character is speaking, they’ll use contractions and shortcuts in speech, and saying those words out loud helps me detect where I missed those. I also find plenty of repetition in word usage. The most common is using the same word, or a form of it, twice in a very short window, like a paragraph or two. It’s especially noticeable if it’s not a common word. Those occurrences also tend to slip past the goalie during normal reading. This is such a critical part of editing my books that I can’t stress enough how much every writer should do the same. It’s not the final pass through the book for errors, but trust me, it’ll catch most of them.