Using TextAloud In my Blogging Workflow

This is gonna be a fairly short post since the TextAloud tool pretty much explains itself. It takes text and speaks it aloud. Pretty much that’s it, but it’s great at doing that.

PC First

This tool is so good at what it does, I’ve been using it for over a decade, long before I even considered blogging. I purchased my first version of TextAloud for my Windows PC back when I was writing a lot of papers for school. Back before the iPhone or Siri I needed a way to translate the written word to something I could listen to since I found it was much easier to listen to a web page while I was driving, riding a bike, running, or pretty much any other activity other than specifically reading the page. And that’s what TextAloud lets me do. It lets me listen to a page of text without having to read it.

iOS Second

Since the tool worked so well on my PC I got it for iOS as soon as it was available. And I started using it for everything. Basically but loading up a web page I was creating my own version of a podcast before podcasts were a thing. I would be able to get the information I wanted from a website in audible form and now I could do it all on my phone. It was a dream.

Not only was I using TextAloud for reading websites to me, I was also using it to read other types of written documents. In my job I had to read lots of specifications and requirements and I found listening to them gave me a different modality that would often help me understand things better. And whenever I wrote something, I would always make sure I listened to it to see if it made sense. That’s really what I use it for today.

Blogging

Today I use TextAloud for every post I publish. It’s one of the last steps I take, usually coupled with Drafts as I’m polishing off my final draft. A lot of times I’ll even leave a post without a concluding paragraph and listen to what I wrote letting the spoken word inspire me to finish up the draft.

Closing Thoughts

So, yeah…as I’m getting to the end of my workflow I compile the post in Scrivner and copy it over to Drafts where I grab the markdown representation and paste it into TextAloud. As I listen, I make changes to the Drafts document and when I’m done it’s pretty much ready to go to WordPress.

Being able to examine my writing in audio as well as written form helps me spot errors in grammar, spelling, punctuation and I always make sure it just sounds right. So I’ll say once again, TextAlound is a pretty valuable tool for my blogging workflow.

I recommend you give it a try.

Blaugust 2019 Day 2 | Using TextAloud In my Blogging Workflow