Medium

A big advantage of self publishing

Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash

Having taught advanced college level writing for years, I don’t need to edit too much; but once in a while I catch a typo or sentence that just doesn’t flow.

I used to tell my students that just tilting the screen when reading their essays could help them catch errors. Medium has an even better way to do this.

After I publish, I click on the arrow that says “listen” and have the AI voice read my article back to me. Even though the voice lacks inflection and skips over some punctuation, it’s a great tool. I found two small errors on the last article I published.

Most likely, this button was added to allow us to read other writers’ stories here on Medium, but it is also a great editing tool. I suggest that we use it that way.

Of course, if you submit your writing to a publication, this approach is less useful. However, sometimes I found some minor issues even after an article was published, something an editor didn’t catch.

In conclusion, I think the listening feature is great for editing and revising, and I am glad we have that as an option.