Why I stopped proofreading and started to listen

Why I stopped proofreading and started to listen

Proofreading is annoying and error-prone. Listening to your writing catches those mistakes which your brain and eyes are trying their very best to keep hidden.

• #lifehack
• #blogging
• #copywriting

Table of Contents

• Proofreading is annoying
• Why your brain is sabotaging your proofreading
• Why text-to-speech beats manual proofreading
  • Awkward phrasing becomes immediately obvious
  • Missing words are impossible to miss
  • Typos derail comprehension
• How to get started
• So what now?

Proofreading is one of those chores that sometimes makes me question why I ever started writing in the first place. You read the same thing over and over, fix a comma here, a typo there, and somehow there's always another mistake waiting. Your brain gets lazy, your eyes glaze over errors, and you start to wonder if maybe the more you read, the deeper the rabbit hole goes.

That's why I stopped reading my drafts altogether. Instead, I started listening to my unpolished contents and the difference is massive.

Why your brain is sabotaging your proofreading #

Reading your own text is much like home blindness; you know what you meant to say so your brain silently autocorrects your mistakes so that your writing appears closer to what you intended.

There are tricks to mitigate some of the symptoms:

• Read your text out loud.
• Read your text painfully slow, staring into the soul of each word and sentence.
• Read your text on a different day, as a mental reset can wash away some of the blindness.

Even with the above in mind, it is still painful and hard to catch all errors, and the more you stare at a piece of text the more likely you are to have your eyes and brain deceive you.

Why text-to-speech beats manual proofreading #

There are many arguments for why listening is more effective than reading when it comes to catching typos and errors, but for me the below sums it up:

• Awkward phrasing becomes immediately obvious #

  When you hear text read aloud, rhythm and flow problems jump out whether you want them to or not. I am known to overuse, commas, like a lot, but when my text is audible it is extremely difficult not to notice these, annoying, and superfluous, pauses.

• Missing words are impossible to miss #

  Your eyes can skip over omitted words while reading, it may even fill in the blanks, but your ears will catch the grammatical break immediately. Much like listening to your favorite song, if one beat is skipped you would instantly notice.

• Typos derail comprehension #

  A misspelled word that you've mentally autocorrected a hundred times will sound completely different, or even nonsensical, when spoken aloud; forcing you to actually hear the error.

  As a non-native English writer the difference between "led" and "lead" might not be immediately obvious when reading, but it becomes very noticeable when spoken.

How to get started #

Most, if not all, web browsers these days come with text-to-speech functionality which should be easy to enable. Please note that you can open local files and still enjoy text-to-speech, your contents does not need to be published online.

• Microsoft Edge

  • Ctrl-Shift-U will start reading the current page.
  • If selecting a piece of text and opening the context-menu via right-click, see "More Tools" and then "Read aloud selection" to read the selected text out loud.

• Google Chrome

  • Open the contents in "Reader Mode".
  • Press the play-button top-right in the toolbar.

• Firefox

  • Open the contents in "Reader Mode" (F9)
  • Enable text-to-speech by pressing the headphone icon, or using keyboard shortcut n.

If you are on Linux and do not see any text-to-speech options in your browser, most likely you will need to either;

• add a browser extension that offers this functionality, or;
• make sure that speech-dispatcher and a suitable speech synthesizer is installed and configured on your system.

You may also use your favorite word processor (like OpenOffice Writer or Microsoft Word) to generate speech for your drafts.

If all else fails, Google Translate offers an easily accessible text-to-speech feature; simply paste part of your text on the source side of the interface and click the speaker icon.

So what now? #

Try it out, it did wonders for me and it might be the golden hack for you.

If I can save just one poor writer from endless proofreading with this article I'd say Mission Accomplished; though I suspect we are many who have downed litres of coffee looking for that weirdly invisible typo.

Best of luck, and may your writing forever flourish.