Reading out loud will also point out rough spots, words missing or used repeatedly. Phrases creep into our writing like they do in conversation, and if we keep repeating them they will detract from our story. In The Matarese Countdown, Ludlum uses "you know that" and "young man" so much in dialogue it becomes distracting. This may okay if used sparingly as a tag for one character, but used too often it will become annoying; if it becomes annoying, we stand a good chance of losing our reader. We don't have the luxury of being a big name writer who will always get into print. We have to be the absolute best we can.

     Reading into a tape recorder and playing it back will not only do all of the above, it is also a good way to listen to our dialogue. Does it sound logical? Does all the character dialogue sound the same? Have we sufficiently identified who is talking, either in dialogue or in internal monologue? It's also a good way to tune our ear to our writing voice. This is the way our readers will hear our writing. Are we too harsh, too cute, right on? Also, instead of recoding on tape, you can also get a digital recorder and transfer it onto your computer. I do this for podcasting, using an Olympus DS-30, a small portable recorder I can carry around in my pocket, but it costs around $130, something I would not have spent if I wasn't going to podcast my books. Since we are talking about this, if you want to see how it my podcast sounds, check out http://www.podiobooks.com/podiobooks/search.php?keyword=Abresch

     Okay, is all this more work? Yes. Is it time consuming? Yes. But considering the odds we are up against in getting our work looked at by agents and editors, much less readers, doesn't it make sense to use every tool at our disposal? Would you build a house with rusty nails? If you've been writing for awhile and have never tried it, I urge you to give it a chance, even if it's only for a few chapters. If you're a beginner, at least try it for the first book.

     Finally, when we have completed all our rewriting and we're getting ready for submission, now is the time to run some last minute checks. Do a search on "ly" for adverbs and adjectives that might be robbing our story of more powerful verbs and nouns. Do a search on "that," which often creeps into our work and eliminate those that will not change the sentence. If we have personal errors we continually make, like using "it's" for "its," do a search for these guys and clear them up. All these may seem picky problems when we really want to get the story out there, but in this world of bottom-line profits, editors and agents will toss stories full of typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors. I'm so bad at proofreading I hire someone to do it for me.

     An on-line writer friend who helped me get started and has since passed away, Harry Arnston, always advocated, "give them no reason to reject your work."

     I think that's what we face in trying to get published--not giving them a reason to reject our work. We don't have a big name. We haven't yet built up a readership. We can't hope that a great plot will get us by. Or good characters. We have to take up the challenge and do it all.

     If we want to be good writers, the best we can be, we have to learn to revel in the rewriting. It's our chance to check for logic, character consistency, scene detail, mood. And if we're getting a steady stream of rejections, perhaps we're sending our work off a few drafts too soon. We can't do it on the cheap.

     This brings us to the end of writing/rewriting. The subject, like plot and characterization, is interwoven and interlaced with everything else, description, dialogue, narration, point of view, but this gives us an idea of some of the things to look for in working our way from that terrible first draft to our tight, crisp, dare-them-to-put-down finished novel

     Before we leave effective writing, there one thing more to be said of it. This quote Easy Reading Writing: