Using a Mac’s Text to Speech to Help Proofread Your Writing

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I’ve been writing my development stories for Capital Gains in TextEdit on my iBook as of late. I’m sick of using MS Word, and copying from Word into the Capital Gains uploading/editing/publishing site ain’t a good thing.

MS Word adds some kind of crazy coding that shows up when it is pasted into blogging software–I have the same issue here with WordPress and on the software the Examiner.com uses.

So, the other day I had a some text selected and did the ol’ Right Click and noticed the ‘Speech’ option, followed by the ‘Start Speaking’ command.  I had been aware of Mac’s text to speech in the past, but never used it. I figured, why not?

I greatly enjoyed listening to my iBook read off my short article to me–but then I realized this could serve a helpful purpose: proofreading.

I am a fast reader. Very fast. And because of this, I tend to mentally “skip” words when I don’t read aloud (this is pretty common actually).  I’m good about reading stuff aloud when proofreading, but even then I go too fast at times.

Because the Text to Speech voice reads at much, much slower pace it helps me stay on track. Plus, there is the addition of the computer just reading aloud, which helps if I missed a word while writing (I also type very fast) or mistype a word.

I also noticed that it helped with some of my word flow a bit. I would listen to a section and think “I don’t like how that sounds” and rewrite it.

If you are a Mac user, play around with the Text to Speech option in TextEdit, it is an easy way to aid your proofreading.

I’m toying with using it to record a character voice for the Magic of Eyri Podcast. We’ll see! It isn’t a perfect system, as the Text to Speech has problems with words such as “live” (as in “to live”) and “live” (as in “live at the Fillmore”).