Use the Mouth as an Editing Tool

Practice 56 reads Austen’s sentence for its length. Say aloud “how wretched, and how unpardonable, how hopeless, and how wicked it was to marry without affection” and the adjectives come in two pairs. We hear the mouth fall into a rocking rhythm that the eye passes over, with the heaviest word, “wicked,” just before the quiet run-out of “it was to marry without affection.” You can check that in your own mouth.

A woman has a paragraph about her mother’s funeral that has looked fine on the screen for a week (a composite case, not a particular writer). She reads it aloud for the first time and runs out of breath in the third sentence. She hears herself say “in terms of” four times. And she laughs at a line she meant to be solemn, because two words that rhyme have ended it. The page had been read many times and never heard.

Our explanation is that the eye is a generous reader. It takes in words at a glance, completes what it half-sees and forgives what it expected, so reading your own work silently, you read what you meant. The mouth has to say every word, in order, at a pace, and it has to breathe. A sentence that cannot be said in one breath without strain shows itself in the saying, and so does a stress that lands on a throwaway word, a cadence repeated three times until it becomes a drone, or a stack of abstract nouns that no one could speak without sounding like a form letter.

None of this means writing the way you talk. Le Guin, in Steering the Craft, takes pains to deny that short-sentence prose is “more like the way we speak”; people, she notes, often speak in longer, more articulated sentences than they write. Her claim is that an awareness of what your writing sounds like is an essential skill, because readers, even silent ones, carry what she calls a mind’s ear, and the faults we call dull, choppy, droning or jerky are faults of sound. Robert Pinsky, in The Sounds of Poetry (1998), calls poetry “a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art,” whose medium is the human body, the breath shaped into sounds in the larynx and the mouth. If that is the medium, a line you cannot say without strain has a flaw in its material, and saying it aloud is how you find the flaw. Mary Oliver, in A Poetry Handbook, likewise treats sound as one of the things a poem is made of, so a stumble in the mouth tells you something about the poem’s construction. Carrying the step over to prose is ours; prose is less regular in its sound and not exempt from it.

In Rules for the Dance Oliver also observes that one reader may hear a stretch of verse as an iamb where another legitimately hears a spondee, because scansion has rules but also elasticity, “a willingness to coexist with a reasonable amount of individuality.” Reading aloud is not a hunt for the one true performance. It tells you whether the stress falls where you meant, and if a sentence can be read two ways, whether you meant both.

In particular cases there are good reasons to doubt the method. Some prose is built for the eye, such as a legal clause, a technical procedure, a passage that depends on layout, lists or citations, and a sentence that is hard to say may still be right on the page. Not every writer can or wants to speak their drafts aloud. Those who prefer not to can have a person or a screen reader or a text-to-speech voice read the page back. A synthetic voice tends to mispronounce names and invented words and to put its own stress on things, so it is probably better at exposing breath and monotony than emphasis.

Whoever reads, the aim is to hear the page at a distance from your own intention. Your own voice works against that, because it performs what you meant, and that is why the exercise has a delay in it.

Practice. Choose one page, around three hundred words. Record yourself reading it aloud at ordinary pace, without stopping to correct. Wait at least an hour, or overnight if you can. Then play it back with the page in front of you and a pencil. Make a slash where you stumbled or breathed in the wrong place; a circle where the stress fell on a word that did not deserve it; a wavy line under any stretch where the delivery went flat for three or more sentences; an X where a repeated sound or accidental rhyme made you wince. Do not edit while marking. When the playback ends, look at where the marks cluster and change no more than five things, the ones that bother you most. The whole exercise takes thirty minutes, including the wait if you work in two sittings. The kind of mark you made most tells you whether the page’s trouble is breath, stress or monotony.