Monday, October 13, 2008

FYI: Proofreading/reading tool

Proofreading is easier the more distance you can get from your work. One way to do this is to get someone else to help you proofread by reading your work out loud. This proofreading method works best when both you and your reader have a copy of your work; this way, whenever something sounds odd or off, you can put a check off to the side and use these checks as an index to things in your paper you want to check. Asking questions of your reader, like, "What was the main point of my paper?," "What would you improve?," or "Did I stay on topic?, is also a good way to get cheap feedback on your writing.

What do you do, however, if you can't get another reader to read your paper out loud? There's tech. While a computer reader won't be able to answer questions about your writing--at least, not yet. It will read you back your words EXACTLY as you wrote them. Add in a hard copy and a pen with which to put check marks off to the side, and you have a workable part of a decent proofreading system.

Check out this free text-to-speech web based converter:

http://readthewords.com/

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