I love listening to other people’s stories. And as I listen I can always tell how much they cared about the story. 

If they’ve truly been concerned that others understand and feel what they’ve written, and not just applaud that they have written, the reading will be smooth and flow. There’ll be no ‘tang tunglings’, no polysyllabic petulance, no flack in the flow. I’ll know that they hid in a cupboard, shut the door, flicked on a torch and whispered the story aloud before they let anyone else near it. 

Your ears will hear what your eyes skip over. You’ve used your mind, fingers and eyes to pound out your masterpiece. But, just like adding up a column of figures backwards to check it, you need to use a different mechanism to the mind-fingers-eyes system to check any writing. Reading your writing aloud activates the mind-voice-ears system, which will show what’s really there – not what your mind-fingers-eyes system ‘knows’ you wrote.

You’ll hear the ‘sepia-coloured people in the old photograph’, the ‘her eyes dropped to the floor’ cartoon, and the hurdles you’ve constructed for your own tongue to trip over. If you stumble when reading aloud, your brain-voice-ears system is telling you that either the logic of the writing is not working, or that the word choices need rethinking. Either way, you get to check the writing before anybody else hears it, which has to be better than them finding your mistakes.

Your ears have the power of observation. You can use that power to save you from the embarrassment of tripping over your own words. Or to create writing that can cast a spell. 

Judy Bird writes around tutoring Creative Writing, Adult Literacy English, and training Trainers. She’s a short-list judge for writing competitions, Anthology and newsletter editor and an award winning writer of poems, and short fiction and non-fiction. She communicates through various media – phone, the net, messages in the furniture dust – and reorganises her books whenever the stress monkey bites.