How to Find Hidden Mistakes in Your Writing

Use the amazing Speechify service

Photo by Trust "Tru" Katsande on Unsplash

You may not have noticed it yet; I didn’t for a long while. However, you can find just above the first image of a story, a link to Speechify, which, if you click it, will read to you any published story, including your own. It’s great fun. It looks like a small, left-to-right arrow.

However, I have begun listening to each of my stories, immediately after publication, to find two types of mistakes, before anyone else find them.

• I am better able to find any post-editing typos and other errors in my writing, for which I am completely thankful. I love finding my mistakes and fixing them. Speechify really helps with this.
• I also have found a curious habit I have, that causes the Speechify readers to misread the text. There is an easy fix for this mistake, though, which I will explain.

First — the problem

Sometimes when we listen to Speechify reading a story, the punctuation at the end of the sentence may be wrongly read.

For instance, the space between this sentence, and the one above, were it applicable to this problem, would be wrongly read thus:

“wrongly readdotfor instance”