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Aug

31

Any blogger will tell you that proofreading what you have written can be tedious and time consuming. But it is a must if you don’t want your post to appear as if it was written by a third grader.

One of the biggest problems I’ve noticed on blogs is missing words. When proofreading, many writing books suggest that you should take a break and then come back later to check it. This technique does work, as it helps you to pick out mistakes that you otherwise may have missed. But, even the most eagle-eyed proofreader can still miss mistakes.

Writing gurus also suggest that you should read your writings out loud. By using this method you can usually pick up on mistakes that you may overlook when you only proofread in your head. The only drawback is that your brain sometimes tends to automatically add the words that may be missing.

Of course having someone else read it for you is always a great idea. But there are times that, willing as he or she may be, your friend just doesn’t have the time.

So what is a blogger to do? A method that I employ that has been very successful for me is to have my computer read it back. I first tried this out on some earlier stuff I wrote. I thought that I had caught all my mistakes, but I was amazed at the words that I had still left out, not to mention that I was sometimes using the wrong form of the word.

Since I’ve been using this technique, I’ve been able to catch many if not all of my mistakes. The only drawback is that it takes time to listen and make the corrections, but it’s a small price to pay for a coherent post.

As for which text reader to use, you can stick with the one included on your computer. Both Mac and PC operating systems come standard with them, even though the voice on both sounds crappy. If having a nice sounding voice is important to you, you can buy a commercial text reader, but they can be pretty expensive. For example, TextSpeech Pro Basic will run you about $30. For this price, you only get the text to speech software. If you add high quality voices to the package, it can run you $50 and more.

Regardless of which option you choose, using a text to speech reader as an aide for proofreading will help to insure that, for the most part, your post comes across coherent… and you won’t any words.

:)

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