Reading Aloud Can Help

How often do you read aloud? As an adult, it’s probably not very often, unless you have small children like mine, who want to hear Go, Dog, Go every day. This type of reading isn’t very intellectually stimulating, but apparently it’s good for our brains anyway. An interesting article by Sophie Hardach was posted this week on BBC Future. It highlights several reasons to start reading aloud regularly. (Read the article in full here.) Reading aloud helps you process and remember what you’ve read, but there are other benefits as well.

When you’re writing or editing a piece, reading it aloud is an important step in the process. It’s common for writers to know what they’re trying to say, so when they read silently, they tend to fill in the blanks with what they expect to read. Slowing down and reading a text aloud will highlight missing or added words, awkward phrasing, typos, and incomplete or run-on sentences.

Reading the text aloud will help you see the mistake you might otherwise miss. Mistakenly repeated words are commonly found on line or page breaks, as shown in this example.

So next time you’re finishing a draft, take the time to read it aloud. You might be surprised by what you find.