Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014

Reading aloud or not at all
Revising and editing
Drafting, researching, and editing

Voice is one of those concepts in writing that can mean any number of things—so many that it often dissolves into something so vague it might cease to seem useful. Voice can be variably invested with meaning, mapped onto or found to underlie so many other aspects of writing; it plays a part in every point of the rhetorical triangle and acts as a sort of cognate for tone, style, point of view, personality, and purpose.

In creative writing, one of your long-term goals should be to find your own voice. In red pen in the margins of one of your essays, you might see its various incarnations. It’s not something to be rushed.

The abstract notion of voice leads into the act of reading aloud. But personal conviction, active participation in communication, and that hodgepodge of ways voice factors into any piece of writing are all implicated in reading aloud as a standard practice.

As a writing teacher, I continue to take satisfaction in what writing students discover on their own simply by reading their work aloud. Although a student might find reading aloud to be somewhat intimidating, it greatly reduces the awkwardness for both writer and teacher, as reading through the draft can be done together with an active reader and active listener, rather than the teacher reading silently, and perhaps making marks with a pen, while the student sits nearby and sweats it out.

The practical benefits don’t end there. In addition, this simple practice manages to catch more mechanical errors, and in a more efficient and shared way, than reading silently by either writer or teacher will. Mechanical concerns that escape the eye are caught by the ear and can be quickly corrected by the writer as he or she reads, or they can simply be noted and then discussed if the student has a specific question about a technical rule. Additionally, sentences that might be technically correct might still sound awkward or unwieldy when heard them out loud, leading the writer to reconsider phrasing and syntax, and often even logic and overall meaning as well.

IDEAS AND INSPIRATION

Pragmatically, reading aloud is a great way to get through the draft before the discussion really starts. But this simple practice can play a dramatic role in transforming the writer’s relationship to the writing. Reading your work aloud gives voice to your writing in a way that puts you in a position to own your words, to connect the words on the page to your speaking, thinking, arguing self. Because of the discomfort involved in this process, it’s paradoxically empowering and disempowering—which is precisely why it’s so useful. When you read aloud, you’re forced to take ownership of your words at the same time you’re giving them away by sharing them with an audience. It’s a confidence-builder.

Reading to a one-person audience in a tutorial session offers more to the writer than an increased awareness of a more abstract audience, although that shouldn’t be discounted. Adding a listener into the chain of exchange between student and instructor reminds the student that the instructor is a listener, too. Even the silent reader hears writing, I would argue, more than we as writers often hear our words as we write them. Reading aloud can then lead to heightened investment in not only the meaning of the writing, but also the style.

So to sum up, reading aloud does wonders for proofreading. It can cause a writer to connect the writing task to their sense of self, and, thus, bolster their commitment to its improvement. But there’s another sort of paradox at work in reading aloud, which is my favorite: at the same time you’re asked to own your words and, thus, become potentially more invested in your work and conscious of how this writing task can represent yourself, you’re let off the hook. You can change those words. You can, through dialogue, decide you really want to say something else. There’s something about the way reading aloud demands commitment and starts the process of revision in a way that’s quite unique.