“The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.”
~Robert Cormier
Having the opportunity to edit is like getting a second chance. Unlike speech, it doesn’t go ‘live’ until you are satisfied with how the words look, feel and perform together.
Even so, one of my challenges is proofreading my own work.
They say never to do it!
But there are times I simply must because of the nature of my work.
However, I’m delighted to share with you something I found recently that could help you overcome a problem I often encounter … when my brain fills in a word that’s not actually there. No matter how many times I read or re-read what I’ve written, I can easily gloss over what’s not correct about a sentence because my brain thinks it’s correct.
Enter, TSS.
Or commonly known as Text-to-Speech readers. A program that reads your text to you by using Optical Character Recognition.
They’re not foolproof of course, so having your work proofread by someone else is always the best option for many reasons. But when I’m in a pinch, I’ll run it through this little program, and it will make the hidden errors seem a little more obvious.
Not only is it great for catching errors, it’s also great for listening to how natural or conversational your content is, especially useful for writing great copy.
Here’s how it works.
Find a TSS reader, many of which are free online.
I’ll use naturalreaders.com for this example.
Here, I’ve taken a sentence from my homepage and copied and pasted it into the software.
The first sentence has three spelling errors, only one of which is underlined to indicate an error.
The second sentence is correct and free from errors.
When I play back the text, I suddenly hear things that my eyes might not pick up.
‘Communicates’ should be ‘communicate’.
‘Operions’ should be ‘operations’.
If you’d like to hear just how good this is, click here to listen.
But there’s one more error I made in the first sentence that is not so obvious when listened to.
Can you find it?