5. Read your material out loud
When you read words aloud, your
brain must slow down and concentrate
on the material. How fast can you read
the following sentence? The quick
brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.
Now how fast can you read it out loud?
It takes at least twice as long, and those
precious milliseconds sometimes make
all the difference between a typo that is
missed, and one that is caught and
corrected. As a popular Internet posting
informed us in 2003, “it deosn't mttaer in
waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the
olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and
lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset
can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed
it wtihuot any porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae
the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey
lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
But try raednig tihs out luod” and see
how far you get. An extra bonus for
reading your material out loud is that
you may discover stumbling blocks like
awkward sentence structure and
choppy dialogue. Strong writing is not
only dependent on error-free prose; it
must be crisp and clear.
As a writer, what is your worst fear? Is
it publishing something littered with
mistakes? Don’t make good writing bad
or bad writing worse by failing to catch
errors before publication. Your writing
career, your business and your readers
will thank you.
Brent Sampson is the best-selling author of
"SELLYOURBOOK ONAMAZON" as well as
"SELF-PUBLISHINGSIMPLIFIED" and
"ADVENTURES INPUBLISHING." As the president
& CEO of Outskirts Press, located globally at
www.outskirtspress.com, Brent offers full-service,
custom self-publishing services to authors
seeking a cost-effective, fast, and powerful way
to publish and distribute their books worldwide.
In addition, Brent consults with clients on writing,
editing, website design, e-retailing and
e-marketing, and entrepreneurship.
www.siparent.com | March 2009 91
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