Why Is It Good to Have Another Person Read Your Essay

What this handout is most

This handout explains some of the benefits of hearing your writing read aloud. Information technology offers tips on reading your draft yourself, asking a friend to read it to you, or having it read by a text-to-speech program or app.

Why read out loud?

If you come up to the Writing Middle for a tutoring session, you lot will probably hear your tutor say, "We always read papers out loud—would yous like to read yours, or would y'all like to hear me read information technology?" Reading aloud has many benefits that we desire to share with writers. Near people have far more experience listening to and speaking English than they do reading and editing it on the printed page. When you read your draft out loud or listen to someone else read information technology, your encephalon gets the information in a new way, and you may discover things that you didn't come across before.

Equally listeners, we need the gild of ideas in a paper to brand sense. We can't flip dorsum and forth from page to page to endeavor to effigy out what is going on or find information we need. When yous hear your paper read out loud, yous may recognize that you need to re-order the information in it or realize that there are gaps in your explanation. Listeners besides need transitions to assist the states get from i main idea to the adjacent. When you hear your paper, y'all may recognize places where y'all have moved from one topic to another too abruptly.

You may also hear errors in your sentences. Sometimes we leave out a word, mess things up as nosotros copy and paste text, or brand a grammatical fault. These kinds of errors can be hard to meet on the page, simply sentences that incorporate them are very probable to sound incorrect. For native speakers of English (and some non-native speakers, too), reading out loud is one of the most powerful proofreading techniques around.

Sometimes sentences aren't grammatically wrong, but they are still bad-mannered in some way—besides long, too convoluted, too repetitive. Problems like these are oftentimes easily heard. Hearing your paper tin likewise help you go a sense of whether the tone is right. Does it sound too formal? Also chatty or casual? What kind of impression will your phonation in this paper make on a reader? Sometimes hearing your words helps you go a more objective sense of the impression y'all are creating—listening puts in you in something more than like the position your reader volition be in as he/she moves through your text.

What are some strategies for reading out loud?

Reading your paper out loud has a lot of benefits, only it presents a few challenges, also. Ane issue is that a lot depends on how you read. Information technology is very piece of cake to read too quickly or to let your brain automatically "smooth over" mistakes, make full in missing words, and make little corrections without y'all ever condign consciously aware that it's happening. If you don't read exactly what is on the printed folio, you won't become an accurate sense of what is in your paper. Hither are some strategies to help you read out loud effectively:

• Try working from a printed copy. This will allow you to brand marks at places where something sounds wrong to you so y'all can return to them later.
• Every bit you read, follow along with your finger, pointing at each word. This can help you stay focused and not skip anything.
• Effort to read at a moderate pace.
• If you are proofreading, consider reading your newspaper out loud one sentence at a time, starting at the stop and working dorsum to the get-go. This will help you focus on the structure of each sentence, rather than on the overall flow of your statement.
• Try covering upwards everything but the department or sentence you are working on at the moment so you can concentrate on it and not get lost.

Another great strategy to try is to ask a friend to read your newspaper out loud while y'all listen. Make sure that your friend knows to read exactly what is on the printed page. Pay shut attention to places where your friend seems to stumble or go lost—those may be places where you need to make things clearer for your readers. Every bit your friend is speaking, y'all can jot notes on a printed copy of the newspaper. You don't have to be in the same room to do this—you could e-mail a copy of your paper to your friend and enquire him/her to call you and read to you over the telephone.

How can engineering science help?

Y'all don't necessarily demand to recruit a friend to read to you. At that place are a number of text-to-spoken communication software applications and web-based services that will help you get your estimator, smartphone, tablet, or e-volume reader to read your paper out loud to you. One advantage of this arroyo is that an automated reader will definitely non cover upward whatever errors for you! You lot can likewise control where it starts and stops, speed it up or irksome information technology down, and have information technology re-read the same paragraph as many times equally you lot desire.

If yous decide to experiment with this approach, there are many gratis text readers available. MS Word has a text-to-spoken communication feature built in. Recent Android and iOS phones also have text-to-spoken communication capabilities, which you lot tin find under accessibility settings. Y'all may as well find text-to-speech software amidst your Windows or Mac calculator's accessibility features.

If you make up one's mind you want to acquire specialized software, "text to speech," "TTS," and "text reader" are search terms that can help you find what is available.

Here are some differences to proceed in mind equally you cull the all-time reader for you:

• Vocalisation quality and option: how many voices can you choose from, and how natural do they sound?
• Controls: can you determine the speed and pitch of the speaker, where the reading starts and stops, etc.? Is there a pause button?
• Applicability: can you convert your text file into an audio file, download it, and listen to it on your phone or music thespian?
• Text handling: does the software highlight each give-and-take as it is read (which may exist especially helpful for non-native English speakers and students with reading/writing disabilities)? Exercise you need to copy text and paste information technology into a new window, or can the program work directly within an application (like Word or Powerpoint), or does it just read the text on your screen?
• Speed: how many pages of text or words can be converted to vocalization at one time? How apace does the conversion happen?
• Type of plan: do you need an active internet connectedness to utilise the program, or can you run it without internet access once it has been installed?

While constructed voices proceed to amend, they will likely not audio completely natural to y'all. Just you may notice that if you cull a favorite vocalism, you lot can go used to its intonation and pacing over time.

I feel kind of silly doing this…

Reading aloud (or listening to your writing being read) takes some getting used to, but give information technology a effort. Y'all may exist surprised at how much it can speed up your revision process!

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This work is licensed nether a Creative Eatables Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License.
You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and aspect the source: The Writing Center, Academy of N Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Source: https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/reading-aloud/

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