Get Your Writing Read Out Loud

I give writing feedback for a living. I know how helpful story notes can be for fixing missteps with character, plot, and pacing; but they’re not as useful for addressing the one thing that matters more than anything else when it comes to the first impression your story makes: readability.

Readability is very, very important. Script readers are often overworked, tired, and, increasingly, are responsible for sorting through piles of slop. If you can provide a positive reading experience for them – a script that’s a breezy, clear, read – they’ll be more inclined to think of your story favorably. 

One surefire way to ensure your script is readable is to have it read back to you. Some screenwriting software lets you assign robotic voices to read the parts, and there are a handful of free services that can narrate PDFs, but these are more accessibility features than proper table reads. If you can swing it, I’d recommend getting a group of friends together and staging a read aloud.  Hearing your work read aloud clarifies things in a way that reading it back to yourself just doesn’t. 

As writers, we’re too close to the work to be truly objective about it. We wrote the thing, so we know the intended impact of the scenes and how the dialogue should sound. But we don’t know how others will interpret it. Having our work read out loud will tell us, with certainty, if a scene is confusing, if a line of action is disorienting, or if a line of dialogue is too clunky. This is helpful for all genres, but is especially useful for comedies. Hearing laughter (or silence) is immediate proof if a moment is working or not. 

A read aloud isn’t usually necessary for the first draft, as the odds are good the story is still going to change a lot. I would recommend doing it before you submit to contests or get a professional read. Whenever you feel like your script is strong enough to hit the market, get it read back to you first. You’ll find flaws that didn’t reveal themselves in a read. Flaws that aren’t necessarily related to structure or stakes or big story things, but in readability. This will have a dramatic impact on your script’s first impression.