Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Reading Aloud

I've often heard writers speak about reading their work aloud before sending it off. I disputed that advice and said, "I hear it inside my head."

This is my confession that I was wrong. I recorded five radio scripts for the publisher of Not Quite Healed. The publicist chose segments for me to read in 35–40 seconds.

As I read in preparation, I was shocked at some of my bad sentences. I understood them only while reading them aloud.

Here are two that I'm embarrassed to have written.

First, it's a good thing I didn't see everything in the beginning . . . Notice the double thing, and I started with a weak it's.

It would have been a better sentence if I had written it this way: I didn't see everything in the beginning, and that was good."

In another script, my sentence read, "We lived with our hidden anguish for years." Not a bad sentence, but it has the wrong emphasis, so I changed it to read: For years, we lived with our hidden anguish.

When I read aloud,
my ear catches what my eye misses.

1 comment:

  1. Excellent examples of a truth I often herald. Thank you Cec!


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