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Spent 20 minutes reading my own first draft out loud and caught 4 awkward sentences
I was struggling with a short story that just felt clunky, so last Tuesday I read it aloud in my kitchen and instantly heard where the rhythm broke down. Has anyone else tried this trick, or do you have a go to method for smoothing out rough prose?
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stellablack7d ago
...my friend Jenna tried that with a blog post she'd been working on for weeks, thought it was perfect until she read it out loud and realized she had this one sentence that repeated the word "actually" like four times. She said it sounded like a broken robot trying to talk. She ended up cutting almost half the paragraphs and the whole thing flowed way better after...
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finleyfox7d ago
Oh man, that's exactly what happened to me last month with a forum post I was drafting. I kept rereading it and thought it was golden until I recorded myself saying it and caught the word "honestly" five times in three sentences. I scrapped the whole thing and started fresh, and it was way more natural with half the words gone.
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