If you’ve read a list of writing tips, you’ve heard the advice to read your work out loud. The idea is that you’re likely better at speaking and hearing English than you are at writing and editing it. Reading a draft aloud leverages your stronger suit. Any stumbles in speech highlight wonkiness in the writing: misplaced commas, awkward phrasings, overly long or short sentences, etc.
The practice works. But here’s the thing: No one does it right. Most people mumble, speak too fast, and are just too shy in the act.
To truly hear the writing, you have to read your work like a radio announcer would. Think: performative and informative. Broadcast that shit to an imaginary audience. Play Steve Inskeep leading Morning Edition, or David Sedaris reading The Santaland Diaries.
Your voice should be louder than feels comfortable, posture proud, and arms forward and holding the text. You’re doing it right if you feel awkward and embarrassed for yourself. Embrace it.
My very first editor at a big glossy magazine taught me this trick, stressing the “like a radio announcer” part. A year later he pulled me into his office. “You got much better,” he said. “What happened?” Radio announcing, man.
That was more than a decade ago and I still use this technique. In writing my book The Comfort Crisis, in fact, I dedicated a full day to reading each chapter out loud before submitting to my editor. The practice left me with pages full of editing ink, even though I’d self-edited each chapter in silence tens of times before the loud read.
And as a professor of journalism at UNLV, I give this advice to my students. I’ve seen it take bad writers to decent writers, and decent writers to good writers. It can do the same for you. But remember: Lean into the awkwardness.
