Read Your Writing Out Loud
Your eyes read what you meant. Your ears hear what you wrote.
Listen
It is crazy to me how often writing does not survive being spoken. A sentence looks finished, but when you say it, you slow down, stumble over the words, and quietly rewrite it while you speak.
The problem with reading your own writing is you already know what it’s supposed to say. Your eye can cheat. It skims, jumps over friction, repairs a bad sentence on the fly, but still extracts the meaning because the meaning was already in your head.
That is useful for reading quickly, but is dangerous for editing. You can mistake the sentence you intended to write for the one actually on the page.
The ear does not let you cheat in the same way. When you say the sentence out loud, you have to move through every word at its actual pace. You hear where the rhythm drags, the emphasis lands wrong, or the sentence technically parses but does not move.
This is the practical consequence of writing for the ear, not for the eye. Robert Frost called the ear “the only true writer and the only true reader.” If a sentence cannot survive being heard, it probably was not as clear as it looked on the page.
So read the line out loud. If it sounds dead, it is not done.