This tip has to do with something I learned from a fellow author and reinforced as I was trying to record an audio book version of one of my novels. It may sound silly, but you can greatly improve your work by reading it aloud or by hearing it read aloud to you.

This can be a tedious exercise, but it is well worth it. I’m going to pass on an anecdote from that fellow author I mentioned earlier. It was a situation that could have been embarrassing at best and disastrous at worst.

She had written a middle school age book. All of the spelling, punctuation and grammar were pristine and she was ready for publishing. On a whim, she put the book through the ‘Speak’ utility that is part of Microsoft Word (I’ll show you how to set that up later).

What she found was, in one spot…