I am totally unable to proofread or spell reliably. Fortunately, Word and most web sites now have built in spell checks. That helps a great deal, but it does not help with proofreading.
When I try to proof read, what I see is the words I think should be there. If I try really hard and look at every letter in each word very carefully I can generally see mistakes, but this is painfully slow and my concentration usually only lasts for a paragraph. Alternately if I wait a few days, I appear to partially forget what the wording was suppose to be and can see some of the mistakes. I can’t always wait a few days.
So how do I proofread faster? I use TextAloud from NextUp. This is a text to speech synthesizer. I have it read back the text to me and I usually try to watch it scroll through the text as it is reading it. It will not skip double double words or the “is” that should be “as”. It also makes it clear when something I have written is lacking in coherence.
The default voices that it comes with are a bit rough but the optional AT&T Natural Voices are much better.
I also use it to read text off of web sites. I almost never read news sites, I just screen scrape the text and have it read back to me. It turns into my own personal radio program.
You can also have it generate MP3 files for later playback. I have used it convert public domain books from Project Gutenburg to mp3s to play in my car during trips. I would never have gotten around to reading the Mars books by Edgar Rice Burroughs if I had not done this. Some of the Project Gutenburg books are now available as human-read free audio books.
I bought text aloud years ago, have never been charged for an upgrade and use it hours every day.
Does it make me a better writer. Maybe a little. Where it really helps is to make certain that others are reading what I thought I wrote.
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