I am perpetually in editor-mode. This is one of my flaws; one that holds me back considerably when I am writing. And the reason is that I spend far more time re-reading what I have written rather than just blurting all my thoughts down on paper (screen?) as they come to me. All the experts say just dump it all out at once; you can always go back and re-read it again later on. That’s all well and good, but when you are like me, you’re constantly re-reading your last sentence back to yourself. What that means is that the rest of the piece never gets written because I am so focused on what went before.
I sometimes wish I could just write without watching what I’m writing. And sometimes I type as I gaze out the window in front of me. I practice to just get it out at once and tell myself to go back later and “fix” it when I am done. It’s a good idea; except that … well, have you ever written or typed without looking at the screen? Sometimes what comes out is so illegible that it’s difficult for even me to interpret what I initially intended to say in the first place.
Joking aside, no matter how you do it, at some point, you end up with a finished product that absolutely needs to be proofread. There is no compromise here. Proofreading is a must-do. Too many times I have gone over my writing and found double-words, incomplete sentences, convoluted sentences, or sentences that just make no sense at all. But re-reading is tedious; especially when you get to the third or fourth reading. So what I tend to do when I have a long missive to proofread, is set my computer to read it all back to me.
This is, I suspect, one of the many reasons that many writers (among other creative types) tend to prefer an Apple machine to a Windows machine – OS X (which is the operating system that comes with most Apple computers) has a text-to-speech capability built in. No special tweaking is necessary (although I much prefer to hear a male voice speaking than a woman’s voice for some things) and it’s ready to go right out of the box. The best part of text-to-speech is that it uses the punctuation you add to your work. So, if there are too many commas (or not enough), you can immediately hear it.
But that doesn’t mean that Windows users are left out in the cold. My husband is doing an online course at home. He learns better when he hears the words rather than when he reads. The course, unfortunately, can only be run in Internet Explorer. So we needed to find him a way to have that course material read to him on Windows. We found a free software application for him to use, and although somewhat rough in its construction, it did the job well. This leads me to believe, then, that there is absolutely no excuse for turning out work that contains several grammatical or spelling errors. The tools are there; you only need to look for them.
Too often, I see books submitted with grammatical and spelling errors that are obvious. As writers, we cannot expect to be taken seriously if even we cannot stand to re-read our own work. I appeal to you as writer to writer – if you can’t find someone to proofread your work for you, find a text-to-speech tool to do it for you. It’s not the ideal solution, and it won’t yield perfect results, but it is a step in the right direction.
