The Voice of the Muse

My Top Editing Tool

One of my favorite revision tools is also the simplest: reading aloud. Reading aloud forces me to slow down, to pay closer attention, to really listen — to the rhythm of my sentences, the music of my language, the logic of my narrative. In a way that silent reading rarely accomplishes as effectively, reading aloud identifies those places where I haven’t used quite the right word, have overused a word, have left out a word, have misspelled a word or have transposed words. Reading aloud can even help with punctuation, showing me where I need commas, have misplaced commas or have inserted too many commas, or where I have mistakenly omitted other key punctuation, such as periods and quotation marks. Most importantly, perhaps, when I’m able to read aloud intuitively and from a place of deep connection with my story (fiction or nonfiction), it alerts me to where something just doesn’t feel right, even if I can’t immediately identify what that “something” is. Perhaps reading aloud works so well because it takes us back not only to childhood bedtime stories but to that deep storytelling past we all carry as part of our emotional DNA. In fact it’s such a powerful tool that I often read aloud as I’m writing, which can get me some pretty strange looks in cafes!