I finally picked up listening to my story (via auto-reading tools), and it definitely helps to cut out the useless 'fluff' from a book, as well substantially improving a pacing and natural flow of sentences. But lately, I've been reading other older authors on the practice before modern times, and their take on the practice is completely different.
Nowadays, authors suggest reading the entire book backwards, so you'll uncover the many typos you'd never notice otherwise, but this seems to defeat the purpose. You may uncover several homonyms, but you'll never improve the narrative flow.
However, The artful edit by Susan Bell suggests a different approach altogether, which I plan to put into practice (on my final edit, of course, which is when I typically cut my story to the bone).
In it, she quotes Bradford Morrow's line concerning reading a book aloud with the fervor of the religiously converted.
There are things that the ears sees that the eye can't hear.
They argue that reading aloud (to someone else, if possible) lets you experience firsthand how it actually sounds, which emphasizes my observations on having MS Word read it back to you. The extra emphasis though, tells you whether the emphatic emphasis you feel actually comes across on the page, or falls flat and needs to be more fully incorporated into the text.
It's certainly an intriguing concept, though like most others is yet another impediment to timely releases, yet it sounds promising, and I'm eager to see how well it pans out in real life.
Any thoughts, one way or the other? If nothing else, it seems worth trying on your opening pages, just to see how it plays out.
