The Read Aloud Edit

Yes, I’ve been doing this with Babel and in one day got almost half way through it. It can of course make you throat very dry. It made my eyes go funny. But it is incredibly worth it. You notice so much more than when you read silently, for example:

• missing punctuation
• superfluous punctuation
• misspellings
• words missed out
• words added in
• clunky language
• repetitions
• lack of continuity between paragraphs
• ugly language
• darlings that still haven’t been killed
• overall flow

There is only one more edit after that – the copy edit, and in fact the reading out loud one partly does that anyway.