Audio books are very good at showing you your strengths and weaknesses.  Listening to the narrator read the words I’ve written shows me where I got on rolls, and everything flowed.  It also shows where I thought I had been on a roll, and how discordant the words sound versus when I wrote them.

Another feature is how much you learn how to LISTEN.  Listening is a nearly lost art I feel.  With the absolute flood of immediate information, people get used to ‘immediate and now’.  Nuances tend to be missed.  In an audio book, you have to listen for those shifts, pay close attention to how the words are spoken as much as why.

Description becomes important here as the setting, the where is as important as the other pieces. A verbal description that is good can help pull the listener into the story and experience, rather than simply hear someone reading the words.

All that feedback is there in the narrator, and it is, to me, so valuable to understand how it sounds, compared to just reading it myself.