by Cindy Nebel

Very frequently, I give writers (my students) the advice that they should read their work out loud while revising. I give this advice because it helps me to catch errors in writing, but I did not have evidence to back up my advice… until now.

Recently, researchers examined whether reading out loud would help individuals to catch errors in writing more than reading silently, or reading a disfluent font (1). What’s a disfluent font you ask? Here’s an example, and it’s the one that was used in the study:

Why disfluency?

There has been some research looking into whether reading something disfluent, like sans forgetica font, could improve learning via desirable difficulties. That is, when learning is more effortful, it often results in better long-term retention. Most recently, a meta-analysis (2) showed that disfluent font doesn’t lead to much better learning, but the hypothesis still might make sense for proofreading or revising. See, when font is disfluent you have to slow down to read it, which means that we can’t use those automatic processes that usually help us jump right over errors.

How did they test this?

At this point we have three groups: participants who are reading passages silently, aloud, or in disfluent font. While there were two experiments in the full study, I’m describing the second experiment here as the results are a bit easier to understand. While there are lots of different types of errors in real writing, the researchers narrowed in on errors that are less likely for a standard spelling and grammar check to find. These were some grammatical errors and some word choice errors.

Each text that was read had only one to five errors, so for the most part readers could read along without many errors.

And here is what they found:

Reading aloud was far better than reading silently or in a disfluent font. Whew - I’m giving good advice! But this isn’t the “best” part. The researchers also asked people before the task which condition they thought would be best for proofreading and then, after they had already proofread the passages, they asked them again… which one do you think you did the best on? Now, remember, these individuals have all read these three types of passages over and over. They’ve been monitoring for errors on all of these passages. Surely, SURELY, they know they did better when reading aloud…

Nope. Not a clue. They rated reading silently and aloud the same both before they did the task (understandable) AND after they had just performed so much better on the aloud passages (what?!)!

To me, this post-task result is pretty incredible and shows us the power of beliefs and the human mind. For many of the strategies that we promote, the results are just counter-intuitive. Re-reading feels like it’s working better than retrieval practice. Massing or blocking feels like you’re learning more so than with interleaving. But we can’t always trust that intuition, that feeling. Instead, we should trust the data. And the data says that when revising or proofreading, we should read out loud.

References:

(1) Cushing, C., & Bodner, G. E. (2022). Reading aloud improves proofreading (but using Sans Forgetica font does not). Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 11(3), 427-436. https://doi.org/10.1037/mac0000011

(2) Xie, H., Zhou, Z., & Liu, Q. (2018). Null effects of perceptual disfluency on learning outcomes in a text-based educational context: A meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 30(3), 745–771. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-018-9442-x