Reading your work aloud

[Susan Boulton]

I read aloud. It helps with the ebb and flow of the work. Where I need a pause, new sentence, paragraph etc...

It also helps with the dialogue, so I don't have my characters sounding like plonkers, or uptight-know-it-alls, or falling out of character i.e. saying things their character would not say.

Problem is when you start changing your voice to match the character in whose POV the section is written in, then going going all "BBC" when you come to a bit in third omi...

 

[dreamhunter]

Again, I have to sail against the tide. Your first one was the best. It was fine as it was. Every time you found some justification to shorten it, by speaking it loud or whatever, you've only reduced the imagery and made things barer and blander.

Shorter does not always mean sweeter.

It's always the imagery that turns me on. Images, imagination, the feelings, those things are what I look for in a story. Besides the action, of course.

 

[goldhawk]

There seems to be at least one landlubber here:



The fishing boat is sailing into an onshore breeze (or at about 45 degrees to). Without going into the physics of the Bernoulli effect, I thought "pulled" was the best word to use.

Sailing against the Wind

But now I think about it, it might not be a good idea to alienate non-sailors in the first paragraph by seeming to be an idiot.

Sorry but the Bernoulli effect decreases the pressure on one side of the sail and the pressure on the other pushes the boat forward. Also, vacuum cleaners don't suck, they blow. There is a Star Trek episode where Riker says a crew was sucked into space. Data corrects him by pointing vacuums don't suck; the air blew the crew into space. A common misconception.

 

[HareBrain]

Sorry.

So I should think, showing me up on Christmas Eve. The festive thing, sir, would have been to pretend I was right.