Matt Webb on reading The Wind in the Willows out loud:
It’s not the lengthy sentences that makes this prose work for me. It’s the rhythm. And I don’t really get that from reading it dead on the page.
Matt takes a cue from Ursula Le Guin’s Steering the Craft: the basic elements of language are physical — the noise words make, the rhythm of their relationships. So he reads out loud, again and again, to get a feel for the text.
This practice helps when processing all kinds of text. It separates what makes sense from what feels confusing, awkward, or unnatural.