Use a Text-to-Speech Reader to Check Written Errors
When you want to make a good impression in your cover letter or written submission, it’s incredibly frustrating to find out later that you left out a word in the very first sentence. Our brains don’t always pick up simple mistakes, so it doesn’t hurt to bring in a little digital help.
u / turtles4dayz on r / LifeProTips encouraged anyone concerned about a spelling or grammatical error to run their text through a text-to- speech reader :
Before sending your cover letter, use a text to voice reader to check it for typos.
There is nothing worse than sending a cover letter and realizing that a word or a bit of punctuation was missing, especially if you – as we should all – claim to be “detail oriented.” You can skip this because your brain will adjust what it sees according to what you intended to say, but the robot won’t.
One commenter asked if the spell checker did the same and u / turtles4dayz gave a good answer:
The spell checker does not recognize missing words. For example: “As a graduate student, I wrote many papers on these topics.” There is a missing preposition that will not appear, and since you know what you wanted to say “articles on these topics,” you may not see it. This happens all the time.
It definitely makes a difference, and it’s a great idea! There are several such applications on the Internet, one of which I used to test the u / turtles4dayz proposal; it’s called Natural Readers . You simply drag and drop your document with your text into the browser and it reads it out loud to you. You can pause playback and resume playback if you want to stop to fix the error.
There are some problems with this particular reader, which may differ depending on the program. First, he is a little confused by acronyms and tries to pronounce them like a word. Several times he read the first capital letter of the sentence, then ended the word as if they were two separate thoughts. I recommend testing the reader before you really need it so you can understand its quirks; then be sure to read any document you are checking as well.
Finally, it would also be nice to read your work out loud to yourself. It helps you understand the flow of what is being said in a way that a robot voice cannot – but that robot voice will notice when you write “and” instead of “an,” and it’s a very useful tool.