All Comments on 'Editing One's Work'

Who wants to listen to a boring monotone robot read anything - even porn?

Your essay is very clear and gives a lot of information that many people might know but do not practice. It's very frustrating to read a story with terrible spelling, too much or too little punctuation, or a jagged pace (to name a few issues). I am especially turned off when a character has a sudden name change in the middle of a story! This is all due to poor editing.

After I finish a story I do edit it, but still need to print it out to catch errors I've missed. I'm going to try your suggestion of using Microsoft Reader and see how that goes. Thanks for the tip!

I want to point out that the Mac OS has a very good built in reader. While it doesn’t highlight the words as it is speaking, you can invoke it on most text that is selected. Under the edit menu there is usually a selection called “Speech” that has an arrow next to it. If you select it, you can chose to have it start reading any text you have highlighted. If you go into the System Preferences and then click on “Dictation and Speech” in the “System” section (in 10.7/8), and you click on the “Text to Speech” section, you can edit many permitters of how your mac speaks to you. You can even set a keyboard command to tell the computer to speak any text you have highlighted.

I use a text to speach program to listen to FanFiction in my car during my commutes all the time. Yes, the vouce is monotone and it had pobloms with slang in dialog; but it will pause with all the punctuaion, read aloud mis-spelled words and make run-on sentences very obvious. I am using the free version of VOICE but will have to check into the one listed in the article.

I think it is an extremely good idea to have an app like this read your work back to you. It has no presupositions on what you are trying to say; it just reads what you wrote.