On the Glories of Reading Aloud

One of my blogging colleagues recently listed, among various aids to self-editing, the suggestion to read aloud one’s manuscript. I would like to follow up that idea with a few reflections, because it seems to me that reading aloud is the key to (almost) everything writerly.

What is the Written Word?

What is writing, after all, but preserving in a permanent, coded form someone’s speech? The ancient Egyptians viewed it as such a mystery that they called writing “the speech of the Gods.” Picture that! The gods speak, and it takes an imperishable, efficacious form—calling into being; changing lives! That sounds like the best kind of literature, which has certainly changed lives, mine included. Long after writing was developed, cultures continued to be predominantly oral. Homer’s immense epics were first chanted aloud from memory—a feat that took days—to an audience round the hearth. Little wonder that the Iliad and the Odyssey are in verse: we all know how much easier it is to memorize a piece of poetry than a paragraph of prose. Advertisers know that too; that’s why we have jingles. So oral culture isn’t completely dead.

Oral Literature

Still, today most people get their stories from a written page. We now call it literature, which implies something written with letters. But the written word can’t jettison its oral past. Words still have a sound. And if you think about it, all the advice about varying sentence length and avoiding repeated use of the same word, etc., etc., is a matter of how the passage sounds. Out loud. It may or may not jump out at you from a page—and why should it even matter?—but you sure as heck will hear it if you read it aloud. Because repetition is a musical device: when used deliberately, it creates a refrain. Sentence length is an issue of meter or beat. It determines the tempo of the writing.

Tempo. Refrain. Sounds strangely like music, doesn’t it? All this is most evident in metric poetry, which really is “dry” music (think lyrics). But prose, too, has its roots in spoken language.

In Praise of Reading Aloud

Maybe this is so evident to me because I was lucky enough to grow up in a family where we read aloud to one another for entertainment. No wonder I love 19th-century books: those authors expected their works to be read aloud in that way. They had to care a lot about the texture of their writing, because it showed up so glaringly to the listener’s ear. Today, authors may feel they can ignore texture on the assumption that people will read their books silently in the airport. But audio books will shine a revealing light on those works! And with any luck, our novels, too, will become audio books. So, how to meet the challenge?

As I Was Saying… Aloud

The best way to proof that manuscript is to give it a voice. Not only does this force you to confront things like muffed punctuation marks (which are cues for the reader to inflect the text with meaning). It will also ring like an alarm bell if you’ve overused pet words. A string of sentences all the same length and complexity will start to sound like an incantation (and that’s not necessarily a bad thing; just be sure it’s what you want). A cluster of assonances may may strike you as funny when you hear them: is that what you meant, or does it distract from a serious context? And so on. Reading aloud may or may not reveal holes in the plot or other long-range problems, but anything immediate—textural—will shout itself hoarse. And of course, even better than reading aloud to oneself is reading aloud to others, because they will notice plot holes!