Proofread With Read Text

One of the best pieces of letter-writing advice came from the CT DOL¹.  The suggestion?  Get your word processor to read your content out loud.

Spell checking can’t catch misspellings where the word spells a different word correctly, such as “no” used in place of “on,” for example.  But when read aloud, the mistake is obvious.  It’s also great for catching cut and paste errors in which a word or phrase may be repeated or missing.

LibreOffice doesn’t “ship” with this feature.  But the extension “Read Text”² can do the job.  After you install “Read Text” and restart LibreOffice, you can select the content you’d like to have read, and then select Tools | Add-Ons and then Read selection…  “Read Text” can also read from the clipboard, so you can use the feature with content from your email client or web browser.

But be careful -- the technique won’t draw attention to homophones³, witch yule all so have two bee vigilant too avoid.

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¹Connecticut Department of Labor
²https://extensions.libreoffice.org/en/extensions/show/read-text
³https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophone