Use All Your Senses

The Business of Writing: Use all of your senses

When you’ve finished a section, a chapter or the entire book, read it aloud. Close your study door, stand in front of a mirror or sit at your computer, and read aloud what you’ve written.

Why? Because there are aspects of our written work which are not immediately apparent when we read silently to ourselves.

When we read without speaking the words, our mind, our inner ear and our senses skip over grammatical errors, correcting them in our brains; we don’t hear how clumsy the sentence structure is; we don’t realize how clumsy is the word we’ve used, which could be much more musical in the sentence, than an alternative word.

These things are important, because a reader, unfamiliar with the sentence he or she is reading, will normally pick up.