Publishing
Audiobooks expose sentences that print is happy to let off the hook. On the page, a line can look neat enough. Read aloud, it suddenly sounds overworked, oddly flat, or as if it’s trying rather too hard to be important.
A human voice has no patience for that sort of thing. It has to carry every wobble, every bit of clunk, every unnecessary flourish. Which is useful, really. Slightly humiliating for the sentence, but useful.
It makes revision feel less like polishing and more like listening for where the prose starts clearing its throat.
A human voice has no patience for that sort of thing. It has to carry every wobble, every bit of clunk, every unnecessary flourish. Which is useful, really. Slightly humiliating for the sentence, but useful.
It makes revision feel less like polishing and more like listening for where the prose starts clearing its throat.
Audiobook is a good test, but it can also be a trap. Some prose sounds awkward aloud because it was built for the eye, not the ear. That is not automatically a failure. Fiction is not a radio script.
What the read-through does catch is dead weight. If a sentence only works when silent, it may still be doing too much work on the page.
What the read-through does catch is dead weight. If a sentence only works when silent, it may still be doing too much work on the page.
Audiobooks are useful, but they can also be a bit brutal in the wrong way. Some prose is meant to be skimmed, not declaimed by a voice actor doing its best to survive a sentence with three subordinate clauses and a decorative adjective. I’d rather use audio to catch real clumsiness than to declare war on every line that doesn’t sound grand out loud.