Writing Tip: Listen to Your Words

Often as a writer we type our story or poetry and are anxious to share it with other people to receive feedback. Before sharing your work in a public forum you should read it out loud, yes out loud, a minimum of ten times. Our reading mind often matches our writing mind, and we read our work as we intended to write it flaws and all because we know what we were trying to convey, but others might not. When we vocalize our work and read it as we intend it to be read and interpreted several times out loud we are able to recognize areas of our work that may not flow properly, words that are misused, line breaks in our stanzas, etc. Listen to the way your words flow. Make sure you are conveying the story your writing mind intended. Read your work out loud a minimum of ten times. If the flow is good and no editing needs to be made, by all means share it. If you need to edit your work, make the changes and start the process over. Listen to your words, speak them out loud.