How to run a listening pass
Marking is the skill. Fixing comes later.
A listening pass is not editing with your ears instead of your eyes. It is a separate pass with a narrow job: find the places where the prose does not work when spoken, mark them, and keep moving. Trying to fix as you go turns a forty minute walk into six paragraphs of fiddling.
Do it at reading speed
Not faster. The temptation with synthetic speech is to push to 1.5x and get through more, but you are listening for rhythm, and rhythm distorts when you speed it up. If anything, go slightly slower than natural. Around 0.9x makes overlong sentences obvious in a way normal pace forgives.
What to listen for
The stumble
A place where the voice trips or the sense arrives late. Almost always a missing word, a misplaced clause, or punctuation doing the wrong job.
The drone
Four sentences of the same length and shape in a row. Invisible on the page, unmistakable in the ear.
The echo
A distinctive word used twice in a paragraph. You will hear the repeat even when you have read past it ten times.
The unsayable line
Dialogue that no mouth would produce. If a voice cannot deliver it, a character cannot either.
What to ignore
Synthetic speech mispronounces invented names, reads dashes oddly, and puts stress in strange places on unusual words. None of that is your prose. Learn the voice's own tics in the first chapter and stop hearing them.
Ignore structure too. If you find yourself thinking the scene should come later, note it somewhere else and carry on. Structural doubt during a listening pass will stop the pass dead, and it is the wrong pass for that question.
Mark, do not stop
The single habit that makes this work: when something is wrong, mark the paragraph and keep listening. Two reasons. You keep the momentum that lets you hear rhythm across a scene rather than one sentence at a time. And you avoid rewriting a paragraph in isolation, when half of what was wrong with it was how it sat next to its neighbours.
When the pass is done you have a list. The list is the work.
How long
A chapter, or about thirty minutes. Attention for this is shorter than reading attention, and a tired ear stops noticing the drone first, which is the hardest thing to hear and the most useful.
Then fix
Go back to the marked paragraphs and only those. Read each one, in place, and change it. Speaking the replacement out loud tends to produce better sentences than typing does, because you are working in the medium you found the fault in.
In Qlemi that whole cycle is one loop: listen, press F on what limps, and re-dictate the marked paragraphs when you sit down. See how it fits together.