Reading aloud during the editing phase of the writing process reaps benefits. For one, it helps writers pick up awkward phrasing that a silent reading might ignore. Reading aloud would more likely detect the misplaced quickly in the sentence I want to pick up quickly errors. For typos, you can leave this task to the read-aloud feature of your word processing software. It will read verbatim the sentence I found man errors, so you can change man to many.
Reading aloud will also help you determine punctuation. Here are three cases in point.
1. If you have questions please call Adam. If you read deliberately, you will hear a slight pause after questions and insert the comma after it. Even if you read superfast, you'll hear at the least a dip and rise in volume between questions and please, where the comma belongs.
2. When she called the customer said he was shipped the wrong item. This is another case of the introductory comma but with a twist. Without the comma, you might not pause until customer and realize the rest of the sentence is senseless. Then you would correctly insert the comma after called.
3. I am not in the office, I am in the conference room. Many people would think the comma correctly punctuates this sentence, but reading aloud would help editors decide that the comma is improperly setting off two complete sentences. They would then replace the comma with a semicolon or a period, or they would place but after the comma.
Yes, you can hear punctuation, so read sentences aloud when editing.
