I was intrigued when I read an article in the March 2017 RWR (Romance Writer's Report) by Patricia Watters, entitled Speak: A New Way To Edit.
I cut the article out of the magazine then put in my towering to-read pile. I finally got to it in the waning months of summer 2018.
Why had I waited? Aarrrgghhh. ðŸ˜x100
As writers, we've been told to read our own work out loud to find mistakes, clumsy wording and left out words. But I know from my own experience as well as talking to other writers, that we instinctively add those missing words, and add inflections when the prose isn't creating the emotions for us that we assumed were there. We even rewrite verbally ourselves if it's clumsy, yet often the correction doesn't make it to the page.
Worst of all, I HATE READING OUT LOUD. It's embarrassing and boring.
But now a great tool in MS Word Office 365, Read Aloud, has made this completely workable. It's a gem of a find.
You can hear your rhythm; languid words, staccato beats, and sentence fragments. While the narrators, David, Zira, and Mark, sound like fairly real people, even adding a touch of inflection, they are...well still AI. Yet the program is good enough to allow you to listen without thinking it's a robot reading.
What they read is exactly what you've written, the good, bad and ugly. And truly, isn't that what we want. The best product we can produce.
And as an additional perk, now that I'm just starting to delve into the audiobook world, is that I've found listening to my work is very revealing...finding those sentences that are awkward, even if they didn't read that way on the page!
Please try Read Aloud and tell me what you think. I'm sorry I waited so long to try this. Don't make the same mistake 😊
To help you find this in Word, I've taken some screenshots of its location in Windows 10, Word 365. You can click on the image for a magnified view.
I'll also have it on my website in an infographic under My Writing Toolbox.
