
When I first started writing, I dove in head first without a clue of what I was doing. I didn’t come from an English Literature or Creative Writing educational background. I had written a few poems and short stories but nothing close to the length of a novelette, let alone a novel. Yet I was determined to write a full length book come hell or high water.
I set out looking for knowledge on how to write a book. I perused the World Wide Web to help develop my craft and quickly realized the plethora of advice offered was overwhelming and most of it completely unhelpful. I bought books on how to write a novel, and even enrolled in a short online course, and finally discovered how to organize my thoughts into a workable outline and get my ideas out of my brain and inked on paper in some sort of sensical form. With my story’s bones in place, I had a skeleton of a story, but still needed the body. It was slow going, but eventually I found my stride, but not without many bumps in the road. That’s when I joined multiple groups across social media and picked other author’s brains on how to bring my imagined stories fully to life. And this is where I truly learned the important hacks of writing.
Now that I’ve been writing seriously for over a decade, I’ve permanently adopted several of my favourite writing hacks and found a comfortable creative process that works for me. And now it’s time for me to give back to the writing community, to help other newbie authors by offering up a few hacks I learned along the way to help make your process easier.
The first hack I am going to share works specifically with Microsoft Word, because that is the writing platform I use to write my books. Your writing platform probably has a similar feature, so it’s something you can look into. This hack works best when you are in the editing phase of writing. But you can utilize it at any point of your process to give yourself feedback on how your story sounds.
The Read Aloud Feature
When it comes to editing, one of the best ways to critique your own writing is to read it aloud. Reading your story aloud forces your brain to process your writing in a different way, similar to how your reader will experience it. It is an excellent way to notice mistakes, inconsistencies, weak spots, lackluster or unbelievable dialogue, and areas that don’t flow well. While reading with your own voice is definitely an option, did you know that there is a Read Aloud feature on Word that will read your manuscript for you? I didn’t know this for the longest time, but now that I’ve discovered it, I use it all the time. Here’s how to find the feature on your computer\laptop so you can see if it’s a helpful tool for you in your writing and editing process.
Instructions:
- Bring up your manuscript in Microsoft Word and place your cursor at the start of the area you want read aloud.
- Right click your mouse to bring up a dropdown menu, and scroll down the list to the title Read Aloud and click on it (refer to slide 1 below). The computer will automatically start reading your story aloud from the point you indicated. You can adjust the volume of the voice by clicking on the sound icon at the bottom right of your computer.
- In the top right corner of your manuscript you will now see some extra buttons (refer to slide 2 below). Here you will be able to pause the reading, skip ahead to the next paragraph, or go back to a previous one, and select if you want the voice to be male or female.
- Listen as long as you need to. Once your are finished, you can hit the pause button and then close that box that appeared for the Read Aloud feature by hitting the tiny x.


With this hack, you can truly hear how your story sounds, and then adjust the areas that need work, while sparing your vocal chords in the process. I hope this Read Aloud feature takes your writing to a whole other level.
Stay tuned for more writing hacks… coming soon!!! Wishing you all a happy Halloween and don’t forget to keep reading!!!
💋 Lanie Mores
I never knew about Word’s read out loud feature. I used to cut and paste my writing into different apps. One I like is Speechify, cause Snoop reads it back to me.