more formal and distant, which gives the readers’ attention permis- sion to drift. You don’t need complex sentences to express complex ideas. When specialists in some abstruse topic talk to one another about ideas in their field, they don’t use sentences any more complex than they do when talking about what to have for lunch. They use different words, certainly. But even those they use no more than necessary. And in my experience, the harder the subject, the more informally experts speak. Partly, I think, because they have less to prove, and partly because the harder the ideas you’re talking about, the less you can afford to let language get in the way. If you simply manage to write in spoken language, you’ll be ahead of 95 percent of writers. And it’s so easy to do: just don’t let a sentence through unless it’s the way you’d say it to a friend. The reason reading your manuscript out loud works so well is because you will catch dozens of things you would have otherwise missed. Like Paul says, hearing yourself speak forces you to notice bad or strange phrasings—even if you don’t know why it’s off, you know it’s off. STEP 1: READ IT OUT LOUD TO A PERSON If possible, read each chapter to a person. I know, that sounds awful and tedious, but reading to actual people forces you to really hear what is and is not working. It’s an incredible forcing function. If you can’t do that, then set up a microphone and record yourself as you read aloud. You can delete the recording afterward. All that matters is that you are reading it OUT LOUD. This is KEY to making this process work. 168 · ThE SCriBE METhOD