Photo by Flickr user The Rocketeer. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Just so you know, if you’ve got a Macintosh you can use the Text to Speech feature to either read someone else’s posts or, even better, proofread your own!

Not that I’m positive it’ll do me any good. I tend to write in the same cadences I speak, which is part of why, I think, I’m so inclined to terminally interminable run-on sentences. And since I write like I speak, hearing my posts spoken back to me may not help. But it will help with some of my less comprehensible sentences (which I also, unfortunately, tend to write the way I’d say them… minus the “um’s,” and “I mean’s.”)

Anyway, if you have OSX Leopard there’s a new voice called Alex that’s a lot better at pausing and taking breaths (if not heavy breaths) for punctuation. It’s a big improvement over the earlier voices.

Windows machines have had the same basic behavior for years as well, I just didn’t think to try it for proofreading before I made the switch.

(Tip of the hat to David Alison’s Blog, an entirely work-safe and excellent source of Windows-to-Mac conversion tips.)

Update: See Zeborah’s comment about the sample sentences Apple gives each voice to play with!!! Yikes! Good eye,Zeborah. I only tried that one voice and didn’t even test that before I applied it.