How To Edit Your Content: Our Simple Trick

When we look at a piece of content for too long, it gets harder and harder to find errors—especially if we’ve written it ourselves. Oftentimes, we miss simple mistakes because our brains play tricks on us. For insatnce, you might have read that last word correctly because the first and last letter are correct, but I spelled it very wrong.

As someone who writes for a living, I had to find a way to find simple and awkward errors myself before posting them to the Internet for all the world to see!

The Readback

It can be hard to see mistakes, but sometimes hearing them out loud can be helpful. One way to do this is to create a voice memo of you reading it aloud. Another way, and what we do, is to copy and paste it into Google Translate.

Why don’t we just voice record? Because, as humans, we want what we wrote to sound perfect. You could be inadvertently correcting yourself even when there are mistakes. However, if you copy and paste your words into Google Voice or Notes and hit the “sound” icon, those programs don’t care how you sound and you will get a true readback of your content.

Here’s how to edit your content with a readback:

Google Translate

1. First, write your article and then copy the entire thing.
2. Then head over to Google Translate and paste your article.
3. Next, hit the sound button.
4. Your article will begin to read back to you via Google’s interface.

Apple Notes

1. Copy your article
2. Open Apple Notes
3. Paste your article
4. Highlight your article
5. Click “Control”
6. Click “Start Speaking”

Through these methods you will be able to hear awkward sentences, and, in many cases, misspelled words. After you have checked the article on your own and listened to it, you should then send it to a professional editor (Shout-out to our super-genius, Mike!) or use a service like Grammarly. This way, you are putting out the best content possible for your audience to read. The more mistakes you have, the less reliable and trustworthy you become.