Use text-to-speech

Good writing is about the rhythm of the words. It’s more about how it ‘sounds’ than how it reads. Whether read aloud in a crowd or a silent voice in the reader’s head, good writing needs to sound good.

One thing that has ensured this over the years is text-to-speech. Mac has an inbuilt way to have anything be read to you. MS Word has this feature, so does Google Docs. With a click of a few buttons, you can have a wonderful voice read your work back to you.

Use it.

It catches typos: I once wrote, “I’m drawing on my shit” when I meant shirt. And I didn’t see it while proof-reading (it’s very difficult to see your mistakes while you’re proofing your own stuff).

It identifies strange sentence construction.

It makes repetition evident. If you use the same word twice in a sentence, you’ll hear it. If you’re saying the same thing over and over, you’ll hear that too.

It’ll point out any auto-correct that you didn’t notice. In the previous sentence, Google Docs had auto-corrected ‘sentence’ to ‘stance’ for some reason!

It highlights your jokes. If you’ve slid in a joke and it doesn’t work, you’ll know!

So, if you’re a writer, and want to write better, use the damn text-to-speech feature.