On reading the piece aloud before you send it

There is one piece of editorial advice that every writer in the studio has heard from me on their first week, that every writer has agreed is sound on their first week, and that every writer has stopped doing by their third month. The advice is: read the piece aloud before you send it. The reason it works is that the human mouth refuses to lie about a sentence the eye is willing to let pass.

I learned this from an editor I worked for in Tallinn in my late twenties. She was a woman in her sixties who had been a print editor since the mid-1980s, and she had two writing rules she would not bend on. The first was that no sentence should be made longer to accommodate a comma. The second was that every piece of writing was read aloud at the desk, in a quiet voice, before it left the office. The reading-aloud rule, more than any other rule she enforced, was the reason her magazine read better than the magazines around it.

The reading-aloud rule works for the same reason a violinist tunes by ear and not by sight. The eye, reading a sentence on a screen, has been trained for thirty years to skim. It moves quickly, fills in the missing words from context, and forgives a long clause for the sake of moving on. The mouth has not been trained to skim. The mouth, faced with a long clause, runs out of breath halfway through; faced with a missing word, hesitates; faced with a clumsy rhythm, slows down. The reading-aloud rule converts a clumsy sentence from a visual problem into a respiratory one.

"On reading the piece aloud before you send it" Lotta Salminen · March 2026

I am writing this essay because the rule is being skipped, again, in the studio. Two pieces shipped last month with audible problems that would have been caught in thirty seconds at the desk. Neither writer would describe themselves as someone who skips the rule; both writers had, in fact, skipped it. The skip is invisible to the writer because skipping a habit is by definition the absence of an action, and the absence of an action is harder to notice than its presence.

The fix, when I have introduced it at other studios, is administrative rather than editorial. The piece is not considered finished until the writer has read it aloud at the desk; the reading-aloud is logged in a single column in the studio spreadsheet. After two months of logging, the habit is established and the column can be removed. I have never seen a writer go back to skipping the rule after the two months are up. The rule is too obviously useful, once you have spent two months with it, to give up willingly.

There is a second-order effect, which is that the writer who reads aloud writes shorter sentences. The shorter sentences are not the goal — they are the by-product of the writer's mouth refusing, two weeks in, to write the kind of sentence the mouth dreads to read. The shorter sentences are good for the reader. The reader did not ask for them and would not have been able to say what was wrong with the longer ones, but the shorter sentences are, every time, more readable. The reading-aloud rule, in this sense, is a way to write for the reader by writing for the writer's own mouth.