Reading Your Draft Aloud Catches What Your Eyes Miss
One of the most effective editing techniques I know came from Bruce Eckel: once you have a draft that feels reasonable, read it out loud. You will immediately hear passages that don't work and need fixing. Interestingly, you don't need to produce actual sound — but your lips do need to move. The likely reason is that this engages the part of your brain that processes spoken language, which is distinct from the part handling written words, and that spoken-language center is far more sensitive to blandness.
This advice matters most for writers aiming for a conversational tone. Many of us were taught to write in a register that differs from how we naturally speak, yet prose becomes far more engaging when it sounds like speech. My own approach is to imagine I'm in a pub explaining a concept to friends. When readers tell me they can hear me speaking the text, I know I've hit the intended effect.
The technique exposes flabby writing. The two most common offenders are corporate prose and academic prose. As a rule of thumb, if your writing sounds like it could have come from a large consulting firm like Accenture, you're doing something wrong. Passive voice rarely helps either. Speaking your draft makes that flab audible, so you can cut it.
Since the original version of this advice appeared, a third source of flab has arrived: large-language models. By early 2026, LLM-generated text has become widespread, and it carries not just the familiar tells but a pervasive, hard-to-name quality throughout the prose. Reading aloud is a useful defense against this — it's harder for LLM-flavored language to creep into how we actually speak. And the stakes are higher now: as machine-generated text becomes more common, writing that sounds genuinely human becomes more valuable.
Personally, I find that I constantly and silently speak the words even as I'm typing them. If you're used to editing only by eye, try adding the vocal step — it works even if nobody is around to hear you.
