Voice, The New Text Editing Tool

Editing a book is as time consuming as writing a book. I find it interesting that each of the people who edit any part of my writing find a different array of mistakes. Each has a different eye for writing style or story structure. My wife (and principal collaborator) has a different ear for readability than the retired teacher in my writing guild.

I relish every comment and correction. I like it when my pages come back to me more red than black. I have extracted an entire education from the varied edits that I receive. Recently, I identified a new editing source that, I’m embarrassed to say, was right under my nose, my voice.

Two weeks ago, I was struggling a bit, to read one of my contributions aloud at my meeting of the Sagebrush Writer’s Guild. It seemed to be garbled and confused. My wife suggested that I slow down and read the passage with more ‘deliberation.’ She told me to listen to one of the other writers when she read her next selection. I did as I was bid. Laura’s reading was nearly flawless. It read smoothly and ‘flowed.’ After the meeting, I reread my two pages aloud.

It was the moment of revelation. My pages were difficult to read in a coherent, smooth voice. I realized that people read aloud differently than they read silently. The difference highlighted the difficult wording and muffled structure that made my writing difficult to read.

When I’m editing text in a normal way, I edit silently. I read phrases and groups of words. My mind tends to skip over the tiny flaws and focuses on the meaning of the entire phrase. Speed-readers read in larger groups of words, whole sentences, or whole pages. Our minds read what we ‘expect’ to read. This is especially true for me, as a writer, trying to read what I have written. I see what I expect to see and my mind fills in the gaps and corrects the errors as I go. However, when I read aloud from a written page, I must read and say every single word. I can’t skip over the grammar errors. I can’t ignore missed words. I deny my mind the luxury of making the corrections that provide smooth understanding.

I went home that afternoon and read one of Laura’s paragraphs aloud. I remember that I was facing the centerpiece on our dining room table. The piece ‘flowed.’ It was readable. Then I reread my troublesome paragraph and I stumbled in a couple of places and fell flat on my face in another. When I took a harder look at the offending sentences, I found that the sentence structure was twisted. The emphasis was on the wrong concept. One was even a ‘passive’ structure. I don’t like the ‘passive’ sentence structure.

I reworked the pages until I could read them aloud, smoothly. I found them to be easier to understand. The words seemed to ‘flow’ together. I gave the new pages to my wife to proofread. I was startled by how few corrections she had marked.

I have two books in the editing loop and a fourth half-done. I took my galley copy of my next release, I’m a Marine, and printed a hard copy. Whenever I had a few free moments, I took some of the pages, sat on the deck, and read aloud to an empty yard. I read most of the book with smooth, flowing ease. Nevertheless, there was a consistency in the type of errors and difficulties that I found.

Reading aloud is a solitary exercise. That’s why I use the technique. A variation on the theme would be to have someone else read aloud and for you to listen. Two problems with the second choice are that it requires two people and the method just doesn’t seem to me to be as effective. I bring it up because some people might prefer the two person edit.

I also have another variation on the theme. I have my word processor read aloud to me. I didn’t know if my word processor had the ‘text to speech’ capability or not, so I googled my word processors name and the words ‘text to speech.’ As I expected, the search found a dozen web pages and two dozen videos (don’t we love You Tube) with exact details of how to activate the ‘voice to text’ feature. Two drop-down boxes and a configuration selection later and I have a new icon on my tools bar next to my ‘redo’ button. If I want to hear my text read aloud in a somewhat artificial voice, I highlight the text and click on the ‘spoken word’ icon on my tool bar. My thoughts sound markedly different when read by a computer in a computer-generated voice.

All three variations on the theme have value and produce different results. Look at the rise of the audio book. An understanding comes from hearing the spoken word that is missing from reading the written word. I prefer reading aloud to an empty back yard. Yes, I read this entry to my empty back yard before I posted it.

Jeff Bailey

Others books by Justina Chen: North of Beautiful, Blind Spot for Boys, and Return to Me.

Jeff Bailey’s latest release: The Defect.

Future releases by Jeff Bailey include I’m a Marine, The Chilcoat Project, and Wine Country.