02 Jul Why is that writer talking to herself?

Kate Kierfer Lee, pictured at right, an editor at MailChimp, offers a sound editing tip, one I should follow more consistently.

I read everything I publish out loud. Last week I read several chapters of [Nicely Said] aloud and made a bunch of tiny changes in the process.

Here’s what reading your work out loud can help you do:

Catch errors. You can scan something a hundred times and still miss an error. But when you read out loud, you can’t help but stumble over typos and missing words.

Improve your flow. Reading out loud helps you write in a way that reflects your speech patterns and generally makes you sound more human.

Soften your sentences. As you read aloud, pretend you’re talking to a real person and ask yourself “Would I say this to someone in real life?” Sometimes our writing makes us sound stodgier or colder than we’d like.

Or nastier, as James Fallows explained to Ta-Nehisi Coates (reprising a lesson he first learned from Ralph Nader).