How to Listen to Your Manuscript Without Reading It Aloud

For Authors We recently explored how reading your manuscript aloud exposes problems that are easy to miss on the page, but the fact is that reading an entire book aloud takes time and energy. Not to mention how hard it is to maintain your focus from the first chapter to the last. Fortunately, there are other ways to hear your work that don’t require you to do all the talking yourself. In this week’s guest post, Chong Wang looks at the practical side of listening to your manuscript, offering ways to get many of the same benefits without straining your vocal cords. By turning your book into audio and fitting listening sessions into your daily routine, you’ll more easily catch awkward sentences, repeated words, and dialogue that doesn’t sound quite right. With the right tools, you can even do so without uploading your unpublished manuscript to an unknown website. Whether you write fiction or nonfiction, Chong’s ideas can help you experience your book from a different perspective and spot issues with pacing, clarity and consistency before you hit publish. Jimmy MacGregor made the case here a few weeks ago: read your manuscript aloud before you publish it. Your ears catch what your eyes...