A cool feature of the newest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader is that it has the ability to read a PDF file to you, using Microsoft’s text-to-speech capabilities. Unfortunately, the voices aren’t that great, and it mispronounces several words (like “wind” is always the kind like when you wind up a watch, and never pronounced like when the wind blows).
However, despite this drawback, it’s a very useful feature for writers. Why? Because when you’re proofing a document, it’s often best to have it read aloud.
And if you have Office 2007, you can save Word documents as PDF files, open them up and have Adobe read them back to you. (You can also have Microsoft’s software read along too, but it’s a bit easier to set it up using Adobe, IMO.)
In any case, having your computer read your document back to you helps you to find places where you made mistakes, especially involving function words (the words that you kind of “skim” over when you’re reading normally). And since it’s easy enough to get it set up, now any writer can benefit :-)
