Quote:
Originally Posted by WT Sharpe
As to proof-checking; I find that simply looking at what I have written in a different medium can be almost as advantageous as printing something out. For example; sometimes I compose my posts to these forums in MS Word. After I copy, paste, and hit the Preview Post button, I often find errors I missed when viewing the post in Word alone.
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Why stop there? Why not switch from a visual medium to an audio one?
By
far the most effective way I've found to proofread my writing is to activate some kind
text-to-speech system on my computer and have it read what I've written back to me. Usually, I'll read the thing at the same time. Mistakes are very easy to find when a misspelled work is mispronounced, or a missing word is skipped when spoken. Reading along also slows me down, since the Text-to-speech system reads fairly slowly. Otherwise, it's too easy to read your own writing too quickly, since it's so familiar.
My e-reader doesn't have this capability--I use my computer--but if I had a Kindle 2+, I could do this portably, thereby exploiting the technology to make editing easier.
Anyway, if you don't have this feature on your device, recent versions of Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader usually have a menu item to read a PDF for you. (The text-to-speech system it calls is not from it, though, but just the default one on your computer. I use Festival with some of the Festvox on my linux system, but I begrudgingly admit that Microsoft Anna, whom you'll get on Vista and Win7, is a pretty nice voice--Microsoft Sam on XP is not nearly as nice. No clue what there is for mac.)
The article is sheer windbaggery. I'm a philosophy professor myself, so I've got a finely tuned windbaggery detector, since it's unfortunately so common in academia. He makes grandiose claims, all based on one example. Maybe the rest of it is true, maybe it isn't, but you can't be justified in drawing such fantastical conclusions on the basis of one thing, using only your own personal experience. In my own experience, switching from screen to e-Ink has the same advantages of switching to paper.