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Scott Lax Blog

Read your work out loud

After I finished up a newspaper column this morning, I read it out loud to myself. I caught a number of small typos, and an extra word here and there that I thought I'd edited out. For most of us writers, there is no edit like reading your work out loud - to see how it flows, and to catch mistakes. Do yourself a favor: read your work out loud before you submit it to an editor or whomever. I think the brain skips over errors when you simply read mentally, without physically hearing them. Reading aloud allows you to hear the pacing, too, and adjust accordingly.