An editor friend of mine once gave me a piece of advice that stuck: “Read your work.” It’s a great way to check if your sentence structures work and if what you have written makes sense – it’s good practice.
Reading your work out loud as if to an audience (real or imagined) brings a new level of analysis. Read it flat by all means, but at some point it pays to find:
The subtext, and where to place emphasis?
How about the rate of speech? Does it require careful reading, or is it a passionate rant?
What emotions come off the page and into your voice?
How about the volume? Are you loud, do you trail off, or is it a whisper?
You don’t always need to shout to be heard; sometimes, putting your voice on the page is the final stage to owning what you have written.