How to proofread by listening on a Mac

Short answerTurn on Speak Selection (System Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content), select a paragraph of your draft and press Option-Esc. Listen at normal speed with word highlighting on, and stop whenever something sounds off. It's free and built in. An app like Aloud adds a follow-along reader you can click to replay a sentence, a pronunciation list, and a shortcut that reads the paragraph under your pointer.

Why listening catches what reading misses

When you reread your own writing, your brain fills in what you meant. A text-to-speech voice can't. It reads exactly the words on the page, so these jump out:

• Missing or doubled words ("the the", "I going to").
• Wrong endings left over from an edit ("she walk", "two option").
• Sentences that run on: if the voice runs out of breath, so will your reader.
• Repetition: the same word three times in two sentences is easy to hear.
• Rhythm: lists that don't match and paragraphs that end flat.

It won't catch everything. Homophones (their, there, they're) sound the same, and a voice reads a correctly spelled wrong word without complaint. Use listening alongside spell check and grammar check, not instead of them.

The free way: Speak Selection

1. Turn on Speak Selection. Choose Apple menu → System Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content (Read & Speak on newer macOS) and switch on Speak selection.
2. Turn on word highlighting. Click the info (i) button next to Speak selection and set Highlight content to Words and Sentences, so you can see where the voice is.
3. Pick a clear voice at normal speed. Choose an Enhanced or Premium voice in Manage Voices and leave Speaking rate near the middle.
4. Select a paragraph and listen. Select one paragraph in your editor and press Option-Esc. Watch the highlight and stop the moment something sounds wrong.
5. Fix it and replay. Correct the sentence, select the paragraph again and listen once more before moving on.

Speak Selection works in most apps where you can select text. In TextEdit, Pages and many other Apple apps, Edit → Speech → Start Speaking reads the selection or the whole document. Step-by-step setup and fixes are in how to turn on Speak Selection.

Other built-in options

• Microsoft Word (Microsoft 365): Review → Read Aloud reads the document and highlights each word. Good if you write in Word anyway.
• Browser editors: if a web editor doesn't hand its selection to macOS, copy the text into TextEdit and listen there.
• Export and listen later: you can turn a draft into an audio file and listen away from the screen. See export text to audio on Mac.

A routine that works

1. One paragraph at a time. Long stretches turn into background noise.
2. Normal speed. Speed up to 2x for reading, not for proofreading.
3. Eyes on the highlight. Following the words keeps your ear and eye on the same spot.
4. Stop and fix immediately, then replay that sentence.
5. Try a second voice for the last pass. A new voice makes familiar text sound new.

Where Aloud helps

Speak Selection is fine for a quick check. If you proofread a lot, Aloud (ours, $19 once) makes the loop faster:

• Read the paragraph under the pointer with ⌃⌥X, no selecting. Or select text and press ⌃⌥S in any app.
• A reading window with a word-by-word highlight. Click any word to jump back and hear that sentence again.
• Pause and resume with ⌃⌥P, and change speed mid-sentence.
• A pronunciation list so names, product terms and jargon are read the way you say them.
• Resume from the last sentence on a long draft, and export to .m4a for a final listen on a walk.
• Private by default. With Apple or Kokoro voices your draft never leaves your Mac, which matters for client work and unpublished writing.

Aloud skips URLs and citation markers by default, which is nice when reading but means you should check links separately. It runs on macOS 14 or later; the 3-day trial needs no card or account.