The Benefits of Reading Your Work Out Loud

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Language is a funny thing. Our brains can handle combinations of words that our mouths can’t. We can run the most challenging tongue-twisters through our minds without a pause, but saying them out loud causes us to slur, stumble, and stall. Which is why reading a scene out loud is a great way to find clunky writing or a bumpy narrative flow.

We skim over words when we read silently, understanding the meanings even if we don’t read all the words (we’ve all seen those badly misspelled sentences that still make sense). That's why it's so easy to miss typos and invisible descriptive words—our brains fill in the blanks and cut out the chaff. But when we're forced to read a sentence out loud, we trip over any words causing problems.

I’ve done a lot of readings at school visits over the years, and let me tell you—read the same pages out loud five times in one day and you get a very good idea of where the trouble spots in a scene are.

Catch the Clunky Words

There's a line in the first scene of my novel, The Shifter, that I stumble over every single time I read it to an audience. It sounds fine in the book, but something about the combination of spoken words is a tongue twister.

The night was more humid than usual, but a gentle breeze blew his sand-pale hair.

Unless I really concentrate, I say "bleeze."

If I were revising that breeze sentence now, I'd probably get rid of the alliteration (much as I love alliteration). The “breeze blew” is the problem. Any number of words would get the same idea across without the stumble. For example:

• The night was more humid than usual, but a gentle wind blew his sand-pale hair.
• The night was more humid than usual, but a slight breeze lifted his sand-pale hair.
• The night was more humid than usual, but a gentle gust blew his sand-pale hair.

Oddly enough, despite the alliteration, “gentle gust” doesn’t cause a stumble. It’s a combination of sounds in “breeze blew” that puts the lips in the wrong positions and trips the whole mouth up.

Catch the Bad Dialogue

This is also a great trick for catching empty, wooden, or stilted dialogue. Since dialogue is supposed to be said out loud, anything too formal or clunky comes through loud and clear to our ears. For example:

• “What was coursing through your mind during such an event?”
• “It was as if you were not even listening to me.”
• “It’s uh, well, you know, I uh, jeeze, you know what I, uh, mean there, right bro?”

It could be very easy to skim right past these lines and capture the gist of what they mean, ignoring the words themselves. But having to physically say them makes you notice every awkward syllable.

(Here’s more on writing effective dialogue)

Catch the Faulty Punctuation

We might silently read right past a comma, but we’ll pause when reading it out loud. Of course, the opposite it also true—we’ll pause because we need to take a breath, even when there’s no comma (which tells us we need some type of punctuation there). It’s also a good way to spot unnecessary punctuation, because a sudden, unnatural pause or break sounds wrong, even if it look fine on the page.

It can be time consuming, but reading your work out loud does give you a different perspective on it. It doesn’t have to be a tool you use all the time, just for those annoying scenes that feel off but you can't put your finger on why. Your eyes might not be spotting the problem, but your ears (and tongue) will zero right in on it (and save you from saying “bleeze” to a room full of sixth graders).

Next time you feel off about a scene, try reading it out loud and see how it flows. If it’s the language itself, whatever is hitting your internal ears funny should be obvious.

Do you read your work out loud? Have you ever found any trouble spots that tripped you up?

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Janice Hardy is the award-winning author of the teen fantasy trilogy The Healing Wars, including The Shifter, Blue Fire, and Darkfall from Balzer+Bray/Harper Collins. The Shifter, was chosen for the 2014 list of "Ten Books All Young Georgians Should Read" from the Georgia Center for the Book.

She also writes the Grace Harper urban fantasy series for adults under the name, J.T. Hardy.

When she's not writing novels, she's teaching other writers how to improve their craft. She's the founder of Fiction University and has written multiple books on writing.

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