Speech Control to catch typos

It’s Friday, which means it’s time to talk about the exciting things I’m writing this week…okay, I’m still working on my pilot, but since I'm nearing the point where I'll be passing it along for notes, I’ll take a moment to talk typos (I was also thinking about typos since Lifehacker just did an article asking for tricks to avoid typos).  Don’t you just hate when you proof and spell check and proof and spell check, only to later find you made mistakes that were hard to catch e.g. repeated words that spanned 2 lines, mistakes spell check won’t catch like then instead of than, an instead of and, or any of the your or its variations?

I’ve been proofing my new pilot a lot this week as my first draft finally takes shape (well, I’ll say it’s a first draft when I show it to people, but it will be more like a 5^th draft when I’m done fixing it).  It’s really important to me not to have distracting mistakes when I pass off my work.  For starters, I want anyone reading it to focus on content and not technical errors.  I will have someone who doesn’t prefer to make story comments (like my significant other) proof for punctuation and grammar, but there’s one trick I really like for proof reading.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who uses this, but if you haven’t tried it, I love the Assign Voices and Speech Control features under Tools in Final Draft.  I think the real purpose of these features is to have the computer robots act out your script for you, but I usually just set all the characters and descriptions to 1 monotone robot voice and have it read.  It’s amazing what mistakes a robot 3^rd party will catch that your eye just glossed over after hours of reading.  Also, the robot voice will help you catch run on sentences you’ve ignored, or even better, chunks of action description and dialogue that are probably too long.

Speech Control is my robot friend