Purple Prose + Writing

Give Your Manuscript a Voice

Last week, I talked about the mysterious voice. This week I’m referring to a different voice. The one linked to your computer. H.L Dyer from the Query Tracker blog posted two weeks ago a suggestion on how to use your computer's voice when editing your novel (or term paper). It was a brilliant suggestion that I couldn’t wait to share with you.

According to the comments that were generated by the post, there’re several ways of doing this, including downloading programs. If you want to learn more about those, or if you use an Apple instead of a PC, then check out the post. Otherwise, here are the step-by-step instructions for giving your manuscript or term paper a computer-generated voice. I’ll warn you now, it’s not perfect. Sometimes the pronunciation is off, but it’s good enough for our purpose.


  1. Copy the pages you want to use from Word.

  2. Go to ACCESSORIES in the start-up menu.

  3. Click on NOTEPAD and paste your Word document there.

  4. Under ACCESSORIES, open the EASE OF ACCESS folder then click on NARRATOR. This will open the ‘text to voice’ function on your computer.

  5. To listen to your document, press the INSERT key and F7 at the same time. Anna will start reading your assignment.

To edit, I prefer to read from a hard copy of my document and follow along with Anna. When I notice an awkward sentence, typo, missing or extra word, etc., I highlight it and continue through the document until it’s finished. I then go back and edit those highlighted parts.

Now why go to all this effort when you could easily read it out loud? Well, because your eyes and brain love to play tricks on you and it’s easy to miss those errors. I find I tend to read what isn’t necessarily on my page, but what I think should be there. This is especially true if I’ve read my manuscript out loud several times. My brain becomes programmed to read it a certain way regardless if I’ve made changes to it.

You can also save your document as a PDF file then used the read along feature associated with the program. I tried it and hated it. It made a mess of my manuscript, especially since it had problems pronouncing words with contractions (e.g. don’t).

Give the above method a try. It’s definitely worth the effort.

editing, Novel, and more:

Give Your Manuscript a Voice + Writing