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Comment by aleyan | Hacker News Reader

    When I think I'm finished with an article, 
    I set the print speed to Slow. This runs the 
    printer at about 100 words per minute, or roughly 
    the pace of reading aloud. I stuff my ears with 
    earplugs and then lean over the platen as the 
    printing begins. Watching the article printed 
    at this speed is like hearing it read; infelicities 
    are more difficult to ignore than when you are 
    scooting your eye over words on a page.

The author forces himself to read slowly to make his mind reevaluate his words. Does any one else do this or perhaps pass their compositions through a text 2 speech software? It seems like it could potentially be a useful writing aid.

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Yes, absolutely. This is standard practice among my peers in creative writing; the last step of editing is to read your piece aloud (to the cat, or the dog, or to the mirror, or a human victim, or just to yourself), slowly and carefully.

My friend who is finishing up his novel is currently in the reading-aloud stage. He's had various friends in and out of his house to listen to chapters as he does it, too.

As for myself, I've been caught by my friends standing in back stairwells reading papers aloud thirty minutes before class more times than I care to admit.

Keep doing it, you're likely an auditory thinker and reading aloud activates different structures from silent reading. Personally I've been known to think in actual text, which is somewhat unusual, but if I'm ever going to speak words I'm writing, I say them out loud beforehand, usually several times.

Yes and no. The biggest writing task I do is film scripts (which run about 20-25,000 words). I'm used to editing as I go and I have the whole story plus a lot of the language in my head while I'm writing (or more often, typing - the composition part usually takes place away from the keyboard).

But once I'm done with a draft, the next day I go get it printed and then I go through it with a pencil, crossing things out and scribbling notes on it. Not being able to edit the paper version makes some errors suddenly visible (like misplaced subject errors that a spelling/grammar checker can't easily catch) and more importantly it gives me a much better sense of the narrative pacing and suchlike.

I do very much appreciate the capabilities of a good word processor. The idea of writing in linear fashion using a typewriter isn't appealing at all. Incidentally I'd like to mention I use Fade In, which is a one-man project by Kent Tessman who answers all his own support queries. It's well worth the $50 he asks and vastly more pleasant to use than Final Draft.

My mother used to be a primary school teacher; she has the habit when reading carefully (correcting homework) to read while dragging a ruler over the paper in order to occlude the next line.

I try doing this with code I wrote, reviewing all files with `git diff --staged | less` before commiting; although reading it aloud would be strange.

I would occasionally copy my college papers into a text file and use my Mac's say command

  say -f paper.txt

I loved my old Diablo 630 daisywheel printer. The sound it made was great - it sounded like a machine gun when hammering out your document. Watching it furiously type was quite a sight. It was bulletproof, too. I couldn't find a computer museum to take it. So sad.

My laserjet is so much better, but still.

After many years of reviewing and debugging code, I can't read books comfortably fast anymore, I'm too focused on catching every single word and punctuation. I'll often go back half a sentence if I thought I might have seen some kind of error. Can't help it...

That's got to be annoying (I used to do that too, then basically had to force myself to stop.

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