I was just reading a transcript of a speech by President Obama, and realized I was reading it in his voice. I'm sure in not the only person who does this, especially for people with distinctive voices. I first became conscious of the phenomena when I read something written by Stephen Hawking, and just couldn't get through it without hearing it in his computer synthesized voice.
In some cases, reading in another's voice is inevitable, if they have a distinctive way of putting words together. It's easier to read Donald Trump's words in his voice, because that's the way we're used to hearing those meandering parades of sentence fragments.
Surprisingly, I don't often read tweets in other's voices, though that's because of the strange fact that I have heard little if any spoken words from the folks I follow. So many of them are people I've found on twitter or elsewhere on the Internet. The one exception is sportscaster Vic Rauter who tweets in the same spurts of phrases that he talks in, so I find it impossible to read them any other way.
I've tried to think back to remember if I did this reading quotes in the past, but I don't think I did. But it occurs to me that we didn't really read the words of others very often. Books and newspaper articles were written by people we'd never heard the voices of. Famous people spoke on TV, but we didn't really have the chance to read anything they wrote. The most was perhaps reading a quote, say in a newspaper. But they were often edited for grammar, and weren't very long. Actually reading things written by famous people is a unique feature of our age.
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