ChirpUp.com

We write all the time: email, blogs, IMs, Tweets, etc. While it’s okay most of the time to write informally and conversationally in these mediums, it’s still good not to make obvious mistakes.

A common tip for editing and proofreading your writing is to have someone else read your work aloud to you.  It’s easy for your brain to pick up silly mistakes or things that don’t make much sense when you switch gears from reading with your eyes to listening with your ears.

You can re-read your writing over and over to yourself, but often your brain fixes your mistakes or fills in missing words without you noticing. So listen to your writing!

You don’t have an office mate willing to read your work aloud? Don’t want to bug someone to read your two paragraph blog post? Have your computer read it to you!

Here’s how to enable Text-to-Speech on Windows: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306902

And here’s how I set this up on a Mac:

• Go to: System Preferences > Speech > Text to Speech
• I like to keep the default speaker, “Alex” and move the speaking rate to be just a little faster than “Normal”.
• Check “Speak selected text when the key is pressed” and then hit the “Set Key …”  button to select your key combination to trigger reading your selected text. I use “Command+Shift+S”.
• Close System Preferences
• Select any text in any program and then hit your key combination. Your text should be read aloud to you!

Your computer will do whatever you tell it to do. So tell your computer to read your stuff aloud to you before you “publish” or hit “send”!

Here’s a short video on how to setup your Mac for text-to-speech (and an example of the Mac reading this post!). Click the video to start playing; expand the video to full screen by clicking the expand button on the lower left after it starts playing so that you can better see what’s going on.

For more copywriting tips, I’d highly recommend following CopyBlogger.