A Case For Reading Out Loud
“Would you mind reading out loud?”
For three years I asked students this question. Their eyes would bulge out of their sockets and they would sink into themselves like a turtle retreating into its shell. During new-tutor training, we were taught that every student and piece of writing—and in every tutoring session—is different. So the approaches we took and strategies we offered would also vary. But there were a few touchstones that occurred within every session and reading the work out loud was one of them.
Without getting too deep into the pedagogy reading out loud gives the student a fresh perspective and in turn, helps the student make new observations about where they currently are with the assignment and where they need to go.
We all know how we want our prose to sound. We have an idea about what we wish to communicate. But when we read to ourselves we sometimes insert words or don’t hear the ‘awkward’ choices we have made. This is why reading out loud is crucial. It allows you to take a black light to your work because it forces us to hone in on what is actually written on the page.
If you are comfortable enough to read your work to someone else I would highly recommend this as well. It gives you an opportunity to get feedback. For instance, students would often stop at a specific place in their essay to ask if what they had written sounded ‘okay,’ to which I usually responded, ‘Why don’t you think it’s okay?’ More often than not this exchange blew the session wide open and allowed for a more constructive conversation to take place. The question gave the student the opening to tell me more about their topic, their writing process, and/or what they were trying to achieve with the project.
They wanted to know if I understood what they were trying to communicate.
While we may differ in what we wish to achieve with writing, we all want to be understood. Nothing really beats reader feedback, but reading out loud comes pretty close to checking that the words written on the page are helping readers understand. If we read something and we scrunch our eyebrows and ask ourselves, 'Wait, what?' this should be a cue that something in that sentence or paragraph or chapter doesn't make sense. And if it doesn't make sense to us it definitely isn't going to make sense to our readers.
