I tweeted about this today, and several people thanked me and told me they’d never thought about doing this before, so – as it helps me so much – I thought I’d write a short post about it.
After I write a story or, if it’s long, about halfway through, I use the text to speech function on my computer to read it to me. I don’t know whether they come standard with PCs but they are built right in to Macs.
Here are the instructions for windows: http://www.microsoft.com/enable/products/windowsvista/
Here they are for macs: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Tiger/System_Preferences/Speech
I find it really helpful for picking up spelling and grammar errors. It also helps me listen for word repetitions and to tell if the prose flows well.
Finally, if it still turns me on, read with machine voice, I figure it must be reasonably hot.
OMG! How have I spent more than a quarter of my life using Macs and never known about this function?!?! THANK YOU!
I only found out about it because my eyes are so easily tired.
Or, import it into Kindle and “Aa -> Text-to-Speech -> turn on”. Though, quite honestly, nothing beats having another real person read it out loud to you, if you can arrange that. (Grateful thanks to C. J. Cherryh and Jane Fancher for that idea!)
Ah, the things a Mac can do…
The sadist often requires me to recite for him one of my poems. From memory. Which isn’t at all what it used to be. (A side issue – how can I have such a hard time remembering my own words?) As I read the piece aloud, as I try to get it to stick in my mind, I come across some spots that are repeatedly troublesome. That don’t want to stay the way I wrote them. I bow to insistence and make the demanded changes.
Usually, it’s only poems. But there was one very long, very intense, and very horrible story that I vomited up at a startling milestone in our relationship. The fiend ordered me to present it aloud at his next visit. Again, as I rehearsed, speaking the text filled my mouth with awareness of words, phrases, sections that needed to be changed.
It works in a way that silent rereadings cannot do.
Thanks for reminding me of this!
o.g.
Well, just as long as you don’t start writing shorter poems for the sake of being able to remember them. I can’t recite any of my own. But then, I don’t think that is the poets job. I think that is the job of someone else. I did the work of writing it – someone else gets the task of remembering it. 😛 Fair’s fair
Great idea… 🙂 Now if only they had something like that for photography! LoL