Attend Your Own Reading

I am always on the lookout for writing tips, and I found many in Amruta Ranade's blog on "My Writing Process." Ranade is a technical writer, so your mileage may vary, but her presentation is methodical and easy to read. Among the many tips she offers, I found the following most intriguing:

I use the text-to-speech feature on my Macbook Pro to listen to the document. It helps me catch awkward sentence constructions, missing words, and so on.

If you end up doing this, go straight back to editing. (Image via Pixabay)

I already do something similar, but I still plan to try this. Currently, when I am close to done editing (or think I am), I will read the piece aloud to my wife. My main concern is that I can hold the interest of and make sense to an intelligent reader -- but she often stops me for exactly the kinds of things Ranade ticks off above. In fact, sometimes, I realize I have to quit and re-work a draft. This is inefficient and frustrating since my wife's schedule makes such reading times rare enough without wasting them on something like this, that I could catch another way.

My thanks to Amruta Ranade for a great idea, and let me reiterate that there are plenty of others where that one came from.

-- CAV