Speaking your manuscript out loud during revision to catch awkward phrasing, clunky rhythm, and errors your eyes skip over on the page.
Reading aloud is a revision technique where you literally speak your prose out loud rather than reading it silently. Your ear catches problems your eye misses: tongue-twisting phrases, unnatural dialogue, repetitive sentence structures, and rhythm issues all become obvious when you hear them. It's one of the oldest and most reliable self-editing methods, used by everyone from poets to novelists.
Your eyes are liars during revision. After multiple passes, they start filling in what you meant to write instead of what's actually on the page. Your ear doesn't have that problem. Reading aloud forces you to process every word at speaking pace, which is slower than reading pace, and your mouth will literally stumble over the places where your prose stumbles.
You have to actually vocalize the words. Subvocalizing (hearing it in your head) still lets your brain autocorrect. The physical act of speaking is what makes this technique work.
Read at a natural speaking pace, not a rushing-through-it pace. Pretend you're reading to an audience. If you speed up, you'll skip right past the problems you're trying to catch.
Dialogue benefits most obviously from this technique, but narration, description, and internal monologue all have rhythm too. Read everything, not just the parts in quotation marks.
If you stop to rewrite every problem you find, you'll lose the flow and miss bigger patterns. Mark issues as you go and fix them in a separate pass.
Pick the opening page of your current project and read it aloud at a slow, deliberate pace. Every time you stumble, pause, or feel the urge to rephrase something, put a mark in the margin. Do not stop to fix anything yet. When you reach the end of the page, go back and rewrite only the marked passages. Then read it aloud one more time and notice the difference.