Why I stopped proofreading and started to listen | Filip Roséen - refp.se

Proofreading is annoying

Proofreading is a chore, and some days it makes me wonder why I ever started writing to begin with. You read the same paragraph for the tenth time, fix a comma, kill a typo.. and then a fresh mistake crawls out from underneath the one you just swatted.

Your eyes glaze over. Your brain gets lazy. The more you read, the deeper the brain rabbits are digging holes in the ground.. which is why I stopped reading my drafts altogether. Instead I now listening to my unpolished contents, and the difference in quality 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.

I'm not sure how many times I have been given advice such as:

• Read your text out loud.
• Read your text painfully slow, staring into the soul of each word and sentence until they are completely inert.
• 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, perhaps even nonsensical, when spoken aloud (this can honestly lead to very funny discoveries during iterations).

  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

Web browsers come with text-to-speech functionality by default (not always), and most of the time it is very easy to enable. Please note that you can open local files in your "web" browser 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.
  • Selecting a piece of text and opening the context-menu via right-click, "More Tools" and then "Read aloud selection" will read only 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.

Linux users might require some manual labor before text-to-speech appears in their 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.