Reading your manuscript aloud

Brian G Turner

Brian G Turner

Fantasist & Futurist
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I've always seen this recommended, but shied away because it seemed like such a huge job.

It still feels that way, but I'm slowly moving through it.

Reading aloud is certainly proving valuable at highlighting sections of text that initially looked fine on paper, but I found myself stumbling over.

The trouble is, once I've edited any section, I have to go back and re-read it aloud again - which slows down an already slow process. :)

Another advantage, often mentioned, is it forces you to pay more attention to character voice and dialogue.
 
I find it a great help, though I don't do it systematically, working all the way through, but rather I do it in an ad hoc fashion when I'm editing a particular scene, and I feel the need to make myself slow down and deal with it carefully.

As well as picking up all the clumsy writing that the eye doesn't see, and making you think about voice, it's invaluable training to learn to read things properly and slowly for when you might have to do it in public. I've been at readings at cons where I've been appalled and embarrassed at the poor technique the authors had -- gabbled too fast, incorrect pauses, poor differentiation between characters etc. We can't all be actors, but we can learn to speak and enunciate so as to give the prose the best chance of shining.** (I never had any formal training, but continuous practice in court does help!)


** as to which, a link to Chris p's blog on the issue Live reading | SFF Chronicles
 
I had the experience of listening to the audio of Abendau's heir for proofing (coming soon, roll up, roll up, and all that there...). It was a really strange thing to hear it all read out loud (I do read scenes aloud, quite a lot.) I got a new concept on the story (I hadn't, actually, really how dark the last third was, for instance. But hearing it read aloud I blinked and thought - oooh, that's what they all meant...).

So, um, yes, make sure it flows when read out loud. Audio is growing all the time.
 
Brian Turner said:
it forces you to pay more attention to character voice and dialogue.
Click to expand...
There are dangers, though because spoken English is different to written English. Written dialogue and narration that's perfect "out loud" risks reading like a script without stage directions.

It can help. I sometimes let my Kindle DXG read stuff, one advantage is hearing made up names and places. Lots of people are put off by those because of ones that trip them up. If Text to Speech on Kindle (or PC, it can be done on Word / Open Office / LibreOffice) gives made up names the flavour/pronunciation you expect, then they probably work.

It does help spot words you have left out or incomprehensible passages, if you are short of a good proof reader.
 
I like that blog piece. In particular the notion of writing with the thought it will eventually be done in audio. When I wrote my first book I never dreamed about reading it to someone, which was almost a fatal error.

Reading the work out loud, at some stage, kills several birds with one stone.
Not that I enjoy killing birds.
Just that I'm rather low on stones.
 
I have found that reading my drafts out loud is quite useful for me because I tend to place a comma where I naturally pause in speech, even if this comma placement is technically incorrect. Reading my stuff out loud makes me more aware of it.

Furthermore, I sometimes read dialogue out loud immediately after I have written it, that way I can determine whether I have differentiated my characters enough. If I do not have the natural urge to change my voice a bit for each of my characters, then I have generally done something wrong.
 
I have used a screen reader in the past to read out my work. Unfortunately the voice is very electronic and doesn't always add in the correct inflections. However it does allow you to sit back, close your eyes and concentrate on what is being read.
 
You can always record your performance and listen back to it later, if reading and listening analytically at the same time is too much of a multitask. Reading out loud, for oneself or others, is an acquired ability, not instinctive.

Ray McC said:
There are dangers, though comma because spoken English is different to from written English. Written dialogue and narration that's perfect "out loud" risks reading like a script without stage directions.
Click to expand...
The basis of language is oral, auditory. Writing is technique for encoding as much of the original information as possible, and even more than translating a book into visual format - film or TV, I'm not hitting at comics here - loses much of its original intention, which must be divined and reinserted by the reader. Formatting and punctuation can do a lot to insure that a large percentage of readers end up with the same interpretation of the words.
 
Ray McCarthy said:
I sometimes let my Kindle DXG read stuff, one advantage is hearing made up names and places. Lots of people are put off by those because of ones that trip them up. If Text to Speech on Kindle (or PC, it can be done on Word / Open Office / LibreOffice) gives made up names the flavour/pronunciation you expect, then they probably work.
Click to expand...

This is how I do it. On Mac you can highlight just about anything (even a whole chapter in Scrivener), the right click and do Speech->Start Speaking. In addition to the advantages @Ray mentioned, a major pro for me is I can take my eyes off the page. I find it helps to just close my eyes and listen to the story to see if its working.

The con is after about 2000 words, I start to feel like Skynet is taking over the world.
 
I read my first novel out loud to my daughter, who was too lazy to read it herself. Yes, it worked. I will do the same with my second.

(Anyone need to borrow a teenage girl to read their books to, I'll only charge £5 an hour...)
 
Bloom said:
(Anyone need to borrow a teenage girl to read their books to, I'll only charge £5 an hour...)
Click to expand...
Sounds a bargain.
She actually listens too rather than browsing phone/tablet/TV? I can get about 30 seconds from my nieces. I'm seriously tempted to take you up on that if she'd give an honest response afterwards.
 
Here's what I did:

I bought a package called "TextAloud", plus an extra voice (add-on). This package allows you to place tags inline in your work to change voices. So I went through the entire doc (global search and replace helped a lot here) and ended up with a narrator voice, a male voice, female voice, and A.l. voice reading appropriate sections of text.
TextAloud also will split a work into individual mp3's, using a tag. I put one of those at the end of each chapter.

So I ended up with my entire book on audio, split by chapter, with multiple narration voices. The voices are better than the Microsoft default voice, but not quite human. Still more than good enough, though, to sit back and listen to. IMO, it makes a huge difference for testing out pacing and kludgey phrasing. This will be part of my editing process for all works from now on.
 
The point of reading aloud is to make you read what's actually on the page. If you've been writing a document your brain can read what you thought you wrote.

Changing the margin and font size to make the text wrap differently can also help you read what is actually written.

I have used at&t natural voices in the past. I found the some of the voices were rather good.
 
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