Editing Tip #2: Read Your Work Out Loud
Hey Story Crafters,
Here’s a simple tip for starting your editing journey: read your work out loud.
Even if you plan to hire an editor or run your work through an editing software, you can learn a lot about your own writing by trying to self-edit. You’re a much better editor than you give yourself credit for.
As I mentioned last week, we writers also tend to be avid readers. And because we’re readers, we know how a good sentence, or a good paragraph, or a good line of dialogue sounds. But to hear what your prose sounds like, you have to actually read it out loud.
When you read your work out loud, you can discover a lot of editing mishaps you can fix on your own. And yes, it may seem daunting or even tedious to go over a 25K-word (or longer!) manuscript out loud, but it’ll give you the opportunity to grow as a writer.
Note: This technique works best if you’ve reached an appropriate emotional distance from your work. If you’re the type of writer who tends to cling to every single word you’ve written, even if a certain word, sentence, or paragraph isn’t necessary to drive the narrative forward, you’ll find it difficult to make the changes or cuts that will improve your story in the long run.
If this describes you and you’ve just finished your writing project, set it aside for a week or two (or however long it takes for you to feel less emotionally attached to every word you’ve written) before you start editing.
And of course, this technique doesn’t apply just to novel-length fiction. Self-editing by reading your work out loud is useful for works of all lengths and genres. Just this week, I put together a short writing resource—a relationship mapping guide (see post script below). I was able to catch a few awkward phrases by reading my work out loud, and smooth out the sentences so they sound more like me, and not a robotic-version of myself. :)
Here are a few ways reading your work out loud can help you self-edit:
1) Punctuation.
Reading out loud shows when you naturally pause to take a breath, before continuing. It can also reveal if you’ve added unnecessary punctuation, and disrupted the reading flow. Depending on how your punctuation currently reads, you may need to add punctuation or remove it to make the reading experience more fluid.
2) Cadence.
When we talk about cadence in writing, we’re usually talking about sentence length variation. Longer sentences, like the one you’re reading right now, have strings of commas or other punctuation to make the sentence grow longer and longer, before bring the flow to a stop. This happens with short sentences, too. Varying the length of your sentences can help set the pacing and mood in a scene, or the rhythm of how sentences are read.
It also lets your readers have a break during their reading experience. While it’s possible to have paragraphs full of long sentences, it takes a lot of concentration to process them. When you’re editing for cadence, you may find yourself rewriting sentences, breaking up a sentence into two or more of them, or combining sentences together, to create a certain effect.
3) Authenticity.
You can check how authentic your dialogue sounds by reading it out loud. Most of the time when we write dialogue or narration, there’s a disconnect between how we think we sound when we speak, and how we actually speak. It’s hard to notice this disconnect by just reading the words on your screen or page.
If you have to choose one tip to try from this post, choose this one. It’ll save you from having dialogue that’s too stilted, or too long-winded, or dialogue that just doesn’t sound like anything a real person would say.
Of course, it’s possible your character is the talkative type who likes to go off on tangents, or just likes to keep up a steady stream of lengthy dialogue. But usually, when the average person speaks, we don’t speak in long sentences. We change it up. We breathe, and take a second to think about what we’ll say next.
There’s merit to following the tip of transcribing or recording yourself while you’re speaking with someone else, to hear how you sound. Or to transcribe or record other people talking (just for reference, not for quoting!). However, keep in mind that in writing, you won’t be truly authentic to how you speak. You won’t have characters saying “Um” or “Uh” or other filler sounds, or overusing words such as “like” and “and.” The goal of writing a story is to keep a reader reading until the very end, and having truly authentic dialogue may cause them to lose interest.
So in summary: write the way you would speak, but a better, cleaned-up version of it.
4) Word Choice.
In my experience, choosing the best words to use in my writing is like putting together a LEGO. You have a wide selection of vocab words, types of speech, and the order of those elements to consider when constructing your prose. Editing is just a more intense version of it.
(So for me, writing is like working with a 100-piece LEGO model; details and descriptive language tends to be a kind of sparse while I’m writing. Editing is like working on a 2,000-piece set with tons of cool elements, and that’s when I get more creative with my word choice and language. How you write and edit differs from writer to writer, but it’s important to recognize how you work in each phase.)
Reading your work out loud will let you hear if you should reconsider your word choice or sentence structure. It can also show you whether you favor repeating certain words too closely together, which might make the reading experience less enjoyable.
Read a page or two of your work out loud, and try editing them. Even if you choose not to read your entire project out loud (especially if it’s a lengthy manuscript), you can still learn a lot about how you write. You may notice you have a bad habit of overusing commas, or certain words. Or maybe you lean towards writing longer sentences, without sprinkling in some shorter ones. Maybe your dialogue is stilted, or doesn’t sound the way people talk in real life.
Or maybe it’s the exact opposite. Maybe you really nailed down the technical know-how of your brainy biologist character (or magic-wielder) without being overbearing about it. And maybe you notice you’re really good at descriptive language, and creating cadence with your descriptions.
The easiest way to self-edit is to read your work out loud. And as you do this, you’ll also learn about your strengths and weaknesses in writing.
Happy editing!
Leah
P.S. This week I’ve started promoting a free writing resource, Relationship Mapping: A Guide for Tracking the Development of Your Major Characters. Relationship maps are a great way to keep track of who your major characters are, how they relate with each other, and help you plan how they might develop over the course of your story.
If you’re a current subscriber, you’ll find the download link at the bottom of the email. If you’re not a subscriber, you’ll get access to the download link when you subscribe.