Listen to Yourself

So you call yourself a writer. If you have affixed a tag that says "writer" on your chest, who am I to say that you are not? The thing is, there are many different sorts of writers. Some write for therapy. Their words are meant for personal healing, and if anyone reads them and likes them, fine. At the other end of the spectrum, there are those who hope to write for income. If you are any sort of writer other than a therapeutic writer, I am going to assume that you care about putting out a quality product.

Whether you are writing poetry, essays, short stories or a novel, it is important to read what you have written. This practice serves as a method to check for typos, to check your style and to verify that your message is on point. Many different articles and books on writing have suggested that writers go one step further and read their work out loud as a quality check. While this is certainly a good way to improve the quality of your writing, it does have at least one flaw. When we read words that we have written, sometimes we can read what we meant to write instead of what we have actually written. We can make the mistake of reading the words that should be there. This is why I am going to offer you a bit of advice. If you go to ...

http://www.naturalreaders.com/index.htm

... and download their free text to speech software, you will add a tremendous tool to your writer's toolkit. You can use this software to read back anything that you have written, from lyrical poetry to corporate reports. It will read what you have actually typed instead of what you thought you typed. You can listen to your words and hear and correct every typo, punctuation faux pas or plain old clunker in your text. This tool will help you produce better writing.

I should point out that while this software is free, they do offer premium versions with upgraded features. I have found the free version to be perfectly useful for my purposes. I am sure there are other similar products out there that might work fine. It just so happens that this is the one that I found, and thus ... the one that I use and endorse.

So if you write, get yourself a text reader, listen to your own words and make yourself a better writer.