What Kind of Writer Are You?

✍ In this blog, I typically focus on writing dissertation literature reviews. In today’s blog, however, I want to shift gears ⚙️ a bit and focus on you -- the dissertation literature review writer. 

What kind of writer are you? 

Whoa there, you might be thinking. Writers have ‘kinds’? 

Yes, it’s true – we don’t all write the same way. 🫨

🟣 Some people, as Sky Marsen outlines in her excellent book Professional Writing*, are bottom-up writers. We start by generating ideas, collecting information, and gathering data. This results in a massive pile of stuff 📚, which we then sift, sort, evaluate and eventually structure once we figure out our argument -- what we think all this stuff is ultimately saying. We are the types who tend to write the outline last. 

🟣 Other people are top-down writers. Top-down writers generate the outline of what they're writing first📋, and then attack their pile of stuff, slotting in the ideas, information, and data they've collected with the big picture view as a scaffold.

Think of it like a jigsaw puzzle. Some of us start with the pieces and figure out the picture as we go (bottom-up), others sketch out a picture first and then figure out the pieces (top-down). 🧩

If you have surmised by my use of 'we' and they' in these descriptions that I am a bottom-up writer, congratulations! 🥳 You are correct. ✅ There are, however, key things that bottom-up and top-down writers  have in common, particularly when it comes to writing dissertation literature reviews.  

✳️ All of us must collect and grapple with ideas, information, and data. Whichever kind of writer you are, this is an essential step.

✳️ All of us, whether we write the outline first or last, need to be sure that the headings in that outline are the steps in our argument and NOT a randomly ordered list of topics. The title of your outline should be your research question and the first line should be some version of My research question needs to be asked because . . . The headings should then be your main points, the patterns and trends you've identified in previous work that make your case (how you filled in three dots). The sub-headings should be the more granular evidence from previous studies that support those main points.

✳️ All of us will go through an iterative process. For those of us who start from the bottom and build up, we will create many interim structures before we settle on the finished one. As we go, one possible argument emerges, we set that out, have a re-think, and then re-structure it. Then we do more reading, which de-stabilises that structure, so we re-structure again to integrate the new information (re-re-structure?), and so on. For those of us who begin with an outline, we start slotting in the evidence, realise the outline has a missing step, re-jig the outline, slot in more evidence, notice that some of the evidence is actually better support for a different main point, re-re-jig the outline, and so on, until the final version -- the one that needs no more jigging, emerges. 

✳️ All of us should end up in the same place, with a rock-solid, well-argued case for why our research question needs to be asked. 

If we both eventually end up in the same place, why bother knowing which kind of writer we are? What are the advantages? 

➡️ A lot of the more generic guidance you'll encounter tends to assume there is only one kind of writer, and so only one way of writing. If you are the other kind of writer, this guidance may not make much sense to you or may give you the feeling that your way of writing is 'wrong', which of course it is not. If you know what kind of writer you are, you are in a better position to 'translate' the guidance and make it work for you. 

➡️ If you know about both strategies, you can experiment with both. You might find that at some stages of your drafting a bottom-up approach works best, perhaps at the very start. Once you've accounted for everything you've collected, you might find that the top-down strategy works best for later stages of your drafting. Alternatively, you might discover that you really work best with one strategy and stick with it. Either way, knowing about both strategies allows you to make an informed choice. 

By way of conclusion, I'll share a personal story. 🤗 I was once sitting on my floor, where I do most of my writing, happily sorting my pile of stuff into the first version of my argument. Someone happened by and asked what I thought I was doing wasting so much time and didn't I have anything better to do (😱). If you know what kind of writer you are, you can smile politely, thank such people for their advice, and carry on writing. 😉

* Marsen, S. 2013. Professional Writing. 3rd ed. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Susan Mandala, PhD is an independent writing and language consultant and founder of Writing Works Consulting. She is dedicated to helping everyone she works with achieve greater personal and professional success through more effective writing, thinking, and use of language. 

➡️ She specialises in dissertation literature review workshops for doctoral candidates and academics new to research, so if you are a research manager or research administrator in higher education and looking to develop research support in your institution, contact Susan to discuss a workshop or short course. 

🟢 Visit her website and email her from there: www.writingworksconsulting.co.uk

🟢 Connect on LinkedIn and drop her a message: www.linkedin.com/in/susan-mandala-phd-6a94b7290

The Critical Appraisal

🔸Do a critical appraisal🔸

If you are a research student, you'll run into an assignment like this one sooner or later. But what is it really asking you to do? 🤔 The guidebooks will offer you clear, crisp definitions of what a critical appraisal is, like this one: 

❝The use of explicit, transparent methods to assess the data in published research, by systematically considering such factors as validity, adherence to reporting standards, methods, conclusion and generalisability❞ (from Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review, pg. 304).

Excellent! Now you know that you need to be explicit, transparent, and systematic. You need to assess the data in the research that has been published in your field. And there are any number of checklists 📋 you can consult that will help you zero in on what to look for (Are the conclusions warranted by the data? Does the analysis stand up? Does the study measure what it says it will measure? Have the methods been robustly justified and applied?).

But how do you actually do your critical appraisal? When you are sitting with a stack of studies 📚, you very naturally go through them one by one. You read the first study, go through your checklist of questions, spot some areas that don't quite stand up to scrutiny, and write that up, perhaps along lines like these: Smith and Jones 2018 put forward a number of valuable insights, but their case study approach does not warrant the conclusions made. And then you pick up the next study, and so on.

There is great value in this, as you are honing your critical eye, 🧐 learning about methods and methodology, and building your mental database of all the ways that your topic has thus far been studied.  All of these things are a necessary part of your learning as a research student. 

➡️ But here is something crucial in writing critical appraisals that seldom gets mentioned -- going through studies one by one and writing out separate evaluations for each study is only your starting point. It is a necessary step in your critical appraisal, but not the final step. 

If you simply put each evaluation in your chapter, you wind up with a series of separate appraisals. Each one might be wonderfully insightful, and each one might show that you really know your stuff. 

➡️ But your purpose in a critical appraisal is not to pick holes in previous studies to show that you know your stuff. If you are writing your literature review chapter, your purpose is to show why your research question needs to be asked. If you are writing your methodology and methods chapter, your purpose is to show that your methodology and methods are an appropriate and fitting way to answer your question. 

The one-by-one appraisal process you started with will not establish either of these things. What you need now is the next step, which is to identify patterns and trends in the studies you've just read and assessed. You need to critically assess the body of work in your field, not separate studies one at a time.

➡️ And how do you do that? Try this: once you've finished step one, go back through that material and start extracting some lists (in tables, in a spreadsheet, on note cards -- whatever works for you). Record key information, such as all the research questions that were asked, all of the methods used, all of the weaknesses that you found, all of the strengths that you found, all of the conclusions and findings. Then start sorting this information, putting like with like, looking for contrasts, and so on. What are the overall patterns? Do you find that most work in your field is qualitative rather than quantitative, for example? Or maybe you find that work in your field is dominated by a specific approach to analysis while others have been left untried? Or maybe work in your field has stemmed from some pioneering papers whose assumptions now need to be revisited? In this way, you move from evaluating single studies in isolation to using those evaluations as evidence in your argument, either establishing why your research question should be asked, or establishing why your methods are justified. 

And now you are on your way to what a critical appraisal should be 😊

*Booth, A., Sutton, A., and Papaioannou, D. 2016. Systematic Approaches to a Successful Literature Review. 2nd ed. London: Sage.

Susan Mandala, PhD is an independent writing and language consultant and founder of Writing Works Consulting. She is dedicated to helping everyone she works with achieve greater professional success through more effective writing, thinking, and use of language. 

She specialises in dissertation literature review workshops for doctoral candidates and academics new to research, so if you are a research manager or research administrator in higher education and looking to develop research support in your institution, contact Susan to discuss a workshop or short course. 

🟢 Hope on to her website and contact her from there: www.writingworksconsulting.co.uk

🟢 Connect on LinkedIn and drop her a message: www.linkedin.com/in/susan-mandala-phd-6a94b7290

Is It Relevant?

Your literature review should cover the relevant literature. 

Well of course it should. This is a piece of advice you’ll often find in textbooks on doing dissertations. It seems so obvious that it is easy to skim over it. Cover the relevant literature. Right. Go it. And how hard could it be? That article is relevant, that one isn’t, job done. 

Or is it? 😕 Like many things you’ll discover as you do your literature review, deciding what is relevant turns out to be surprisingly complex. There is more here to think about than you might have first supposed, and that is what this blog is about. 

In some cases, you will indeed find that one source is clearly relevant and another clearly isn’t. In many other cases, however, there are at least two intermediate categories between relevant and not relevant:

✅ don’t know yet, and 

✅ marginally relevant. 

We’ll deal with each one in turn. 

There will be times, especially in the early stages of your dissertation, when you simply don’t know yet if something is relevant. This often shows up as doubt. Does it fit? Could it fit? Do I need to tweak my research question? Am I on the right track? You have your two clear piles – relevant and not relevant, but every time you plonk the article into the discard pile, you fish it out again. What if it is relevant? What if I haven’t understood it properly? I just don’t know! 😱

This indecision may feel frustrating, but it is a healthy part of the process. Your research project develops as you go, so there will be many points along the way when you aren’t immediately sure about something. That is okay. 😊👍 The thing to do is to recognise that the temporary indecision is actually a decision: you don’t know yet. In between Relevant and Not Relevant, make yourself a pile for Not Sure Yet. For every source in this pile, record the basics (what the study is asking, what it found, what its methods were) and why you aren’t sure. Be as specific here as you can. Then, just leave it in the Not Sure Yet pile and go on to the next one. 

Maybe in a week, or two, or in a month, or in a year, you will encounter another article and say Ah ha! Now I know how that article is relevant! 😃 Or maybe, as you periodically review your Not Sure Yet pile from an increasingly sophisticated vantage point, you’ll be able to see at a glance why the source that originally gave you such angst either is or is not relevant. 

This brings us to the second point, the marginally relevant sources. Dealing with these takes up a surprising amount of time. At first, this seems counter intuitive, as marginally relevant suggests something you can deal with briefly. In your final write-up, this will be true – your treatment of what is marginally relevant will be brief. But getting to that confident articulation of what is worth mentioning but not centrally relevant involves some complex thinking and careful analysis. 🤔

An example from my own practice in writing literature reviews may be helpful here. I give such examples from time to time in this blog because with my own work and I can point to the decision-making process I went through as I wrestled a pile of reading notes into a finished article. This process goes straight to the heart of the matter when it comes to writing a literature review (or anything, really), but I find that what it entails is often missing from the textbooks and how-guides. I therefore share it with you here. Was it helpful? ✍ Let me know in the comments! ✍

This comes from my paper on weird -y suffixes in the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BTVS). I approached this from a linguistic perspective, as my area of expertise is stylistics (the study of choice in language). As I was reading the literature on Buffy for my review, I noticed that the bulk of the work was coming from other fields. That body of work was relevant, as it was on the text I was studying, but not centrally so, as it was not interested in matters of language. In the final version of my paper, all of this work was dealt with in a single sentence: 

‘In the growing body of BTVS literature, two areas of enquiry have emerged as particularly salient: interpreting the vampires and demons as symbols for society’s fears (Erickson, 2002; Jowett, 2002; Krzywinska, 2002); and interrogating the transgressive potential of the show with respect to gender (Braun, 2001: 91; Graham, 2002; Levy, 2003; Owen, 1999; Pender 2002; Williams, 2002); race and class (Alessio, 2001; Edwards, 2002); and power (Buinicki and Enns, 2002; Playden, 2001)’ (Mandala 2007: 53). 

Getting to this single sentence, however, took several months of work, primarily for the following reasons. 

📌 There are 13 papers cited here so in the first place I had to read and annotate them all. Yes, they were all marginally relevant, but I still had to read them all carefully to decide why and how. 

📌After reading and annotating I had to analyse my notes, which I did through a process of thematic coding. The result of that analysis is presented succinctly above: this body of work comes down to two main areas, a dissection of fears and an interest in transgressive potential. The second area had three sub-themes, gender; race/class; and power. The 13 papers did not announce themselves as belonging to these themes; rather, that was something I had to decide and articulate after thinking carefully about the body of work as whole (instead of one study at a time). 

📌 To deal with the theme on transgressive potential, I had to come to grips with media and cultural studies, a subject outside my own area of expertise. Having trained as a linguist, I had never covered this but no matter -- it was still my responsibility. This meant taking some time to dig into the tertiary sources to figure out what this field was about so that I could fully understand the papers that emerged from them. 

📌 To put it all together, I drafted many versions of my review. Does it surprise you to learn that what eventually became a single sentence in my final version was originally 6 pages long? That might sound like wasted time, but each articulation of the longer version increased my mastery over the previous work and why it mattered to my research. Over time, this drafting process gradually distilled for me what was most essential, allowing me to deal fairly but briefly with the marginally relevant material so that I could expand on what was centrally relevant. 

And there you have it – what it really takes to deal with sources that are marginally relevant. The next time you come across a paper that deals briefly with marginal material, spend a bit of time over it. What amount and kind of work went into it? What can you learn from that about doing your own review? 

If anyone is interested in my paper or the sources cited therein, the references is Mandala, S. (2007). ‘Solidarity and the Scoobies: An Analysis of the -y Suffix in the Television Series Buffy the Vampire Slayer’. Language and Literature 16 (1): 53-73. 

Susan Mandala, PhD is an independent writing and language consultant and founder of Writing Works Consulting. She is dedicated to helping everyone she works with achieve greater personal and professional success through more effective writing and use of language. 

She specialises in dissertation literature review training for doctoral candidates and academics new to research, so if you are a research manager or research administrator in higher education and looking to develop research support in your institution, contact Susan to discuss a workshop or short course. 

🟩 Visit her website: www.writingworksconsulting.co.uk

🟩 Connect on LinkedIn and drop her a message: www.linkedin.com/in/susan-mandala-phd-6a94b7290

🟩 If you know someone who will find this blog useful, please feel free to share it in your networks. 😊

Insights for 2025: Remembering What the Dissertation Literature Review is For

 Happy New Year! 🥳 Here it is, the start of January, often a time to sit down and make some firm resolutions that, this year, we are really going to stick to. So if you have your bullet point list already populated with things like:

🔆 Get up an hour earlier and write for 1 hour everyday

🔆 Read and annotate 5 articles every week

🔆 Have the complete first draft of my literature review chapter done by March 31st, 

great stuff! Keep going.

This time of year is also, however, a good time to take stock -- to step back and reassess things. Are we doing the right things for the right reasons? Over the course of a year, it is very easy to get so bogged down in the details that we lose sight of our real mission. We set out with a clear vision, translate that vision into goals, and then set out the tasks to achieve those goals. But over time, the tasks tend to take on a life of their own and without realising it they become the mission. Just get to the end of the list! we say to ourselves, hoping that by the time Friday comes we'll find most of our tasks done and crossed off. 📝

I think this tendency to slip into mindlessly chasing tasks happens because we forget to take into account how much we'll learn and develop as we spend a year working on something. Our overall mission may stay the same, but what we do to achieve it needs to be periodically updated as we become more advanced in our skills and knowledge. Ticking things off our list is excellent (and if you read this blog regularly, you know I love lists!). 📋 ✔ But every now and again, we need to step back and think about what it is that is driving our list in the first place. 

And that is what today's blog is about. As we set out on a brand new year, are we still aligned with our guiding star? 🌟As we sit amongst our piles of papers and notes, digging our way through, do we remember why we are doing a literature review in the first the place? Or are we demotivated because we have we lost sight of what it's all for?

Regular readers of this blog will know that the purpose of your literature review is to make the case for why your research question needs to be asked. And this is true -- that is what your literature review should do. But why should it do that? Why is it necessary to establish why your question should be asked? Or, as a number of my students have asked over the years, Why can't we just write about our stuff? Why can't we just ask and answer our question and leave it at that?

🔑 My answer is this: we make the case for why our question needs to be asked in order to identify how the answer we come up with counts as a contribution -- how it advances the sum of human learning. What new and unique piece of knowledge does your research put in the world and why does it matter? There is no way to know that if you don't know the state of your field. How does what you now know build on what we already know? You can't see that unless you have identified the prevailing patterns and trends in what we already know. That is what the textbooks and how-to guides mean when they talk about mastering the literature or effective evaluation or locating your study with respect previous research.

Was this blog helpful for you or your students? Want to know more about translating the why of doing a literature review into the how? 

✅ Hop onto my website www.writingworksconsulting.co.uk or connect on LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/susan-mandala-phd-6a94b7290 and drop me a message to talk about master classes, day-long workshops, or short courses. I'd love to hear from you 😊

The Twelve Tips of Christmas

 It is that time of year again. 🎄🎉 We are frantically getting those last things done, running around buying presents 🎁, writing cards, and doing all the other things we do to prepare for the holiday season. If, in amongst all that you are also one of those brave people writing a dissertation 📚, you might also be setting aside some precious undistracted time to work on your literature review. In honour of the season, I wanted to share with you my 12 most successful mistakes. Yes, you read that correctly  -- successful mistakes. Doing anything for the first time involves some stumbling around, and I certainly did my share of that. It was when I fell down and got back up that I learned the most, and in this blog that is what I want to share with you. 

So, here it is -- my 12 most productive mistakes from 30 years of writing literature reviews and what they taught me.

1. Not understanding the role of description. If you read my blog regularly, you'll know your literature review is an argument in which you make the case for why your research question needs to be asked. Your evidence for this argument comes from previous research.  However, in order to get to the stage of putting  that argument together, you first have to understand the previous research, and that means a lengthy phase of describing those studies to yourself. Value this, as it is essential. But don't stop there, as this phase is just for you. For your dissertation, use your knowledge of each source to construct your argument and work out the evidence for it. ✍

2. Thinking that the unit of analysis in my literature review was each study, and trying without much success to figure out how the summary of each study was or wasn't evidence in my argument. That sent me back down the describe-every-study rabbit hole, until I figured out that the unit was not the study per se, but the findings of all the studies.  What were the patterns and trends in all the findings? That was the thing to figure out. 🤔

3. Writing endless outlines but not getting anywhere. Finally, I figured out that this did not work, at least not for me, because my outlines were lists of topics.  Lists of topics do not allow you to work out the structure of your argument.  For that, I finally hit on the card-sorting technique, which allowed me to determine my main points (my research question needs to be asked because. . . . ) and the evidence for each point. For more on that, see my post on how your literature review is like a qualitative research project.

4. Thinking that frustration was my enemy.  It certainly feels like an enemy 😖, but over time I came to understand that frustration was a sign that I was moving out of my comfort zone  -- and moving out of your comfort zone is the only way to learn and make progress. If you stay where you are comfortable you never have to grapple with anything new. You will avoid frustration that way, but you will also avoid important breakthroughs in your understanding.

5. Confusing productive breaks with displacement activities. We all need breaks when we are writing. Sometimes we hit what feels like an impenetrable snarl, and taking a walk 🏃 helps us to think in new ways. But know the difference between a break that enables more creative and productive thinking and the displacement activity, which is really just a form of procrastination. If you are thinking Oh, I'll just do the dishes before I start, and since I've done the dishes I might as well do the counter tops . . . that is a displacement activity. If you go down that road, your house might sparkle, but you won't be any further along on your literature review. 

6. Thinking that if I ended the day as confused as I began that I hadn't made any progress. This is not true. A literature review is a complex thing and some of the issues you have to deal with won't be solved in a day. If you stop work some days and all you have is a list of things you don't understand, that is progress. Now you know what you don't know yet. 💡

7. Trying to write in the afternoon and finally figuring out that I am a morning person 🌅. The literature review involves a lot of reading, thinking, and writing, but there is also a fair amount of administrative work. Figure out when you are at your best and do your writing then. Plough through the admin stuff during the other part of the day. 

8. Thinking I should be able to concentrate solidly for hours without a break and getting annoyed with myself when I couldn't. 😠 I found that I got immersed for about 30 minutes, then needed a micro-break -- to look up, shift my gaze, roll my shoulders -- then could do another 30 minutes, and so on. I was relieved to discover that this was normal. 

9. Trying to find shortcuts. On a day when I just couldn't face more note-taking, I would highlight things instead as I read. And that way, it wasn't even like work, as I could sit in my cosy chair and just read. I told myself I would go back to the highlighted bits and convert them into notes later so that I could figure out how they fit into my argument (or not). That never worked, not once, and was always wasted time. Inevitably, I lost track of the highlighted material and just wound up re-reading and taking the notes I should have taken the first time.  📖

10. Worrying about the word limit. The word limit is a tangible metric and can be a useful guide, but it is not the goal. Your goal is not to write a certain number of words. Your goal is to put together a rock-solid argument for why your research question needs to be asked. I discovered that when I did that, the word-limit took care of itself. 📘

11. Trying to edit before I knew all the steps in my argument and before I had assembled all of the evidence. This just led to hopeless confusion and much wasted time. When you have your argument nailed down and all the evidence assembled, you can spot extraneous detail immediately and just get rid of it without second-guessing yourself. ✂

12. Trying to work straight through Christmas. The holiday period frees up some time, and one year I decided I would only do the bare minimum for Christmas and then put my head down and write. I just made myself miserable and tired and wound up having to take a break when Christmas was over. There wasn't even any turkey left. 

Whatever and however you celebrate this season, allow yourself that time. I wish you the joy of it!

The Literature Review: Busting Some Common Myths

 I am sometimes startled by the myths and misunderstandings that I find circulating about the literature review, so today’s blog is the first in a semi-regular series on busting these myths 💪 or, at the very least, unpicking them to get at some useful truths. To get us started, have a think about this claim, which pops up with annoying regularity: The literature review is all about other people’s work, so it won’t be original. 

True or false? 🤔 The sharp-eyed amongst you will already have noticed that there are two claims here -- bad practice for a true-or-false item, to be sure, but a good place to begin our discussion. Let’s take each claim in turn. 

The literature review is all about other people’s work. Is it? In one sense, this is true. The main purpose of a literature review is to analyse the body of previous work in a field to establish why a research question needs to be asked. So, yes -- a literature review in this narrow sense deals with other people’s research.

But is this all it is about, or even primarily what it is about? No. If the job is done right, the findings, insights, observations, and everything else discovered in the body of previous research should be treated as evidence in the unfolding case for why the research question needs to be asked. The literature review is not about what other people have found; it is about what you do with those findings as the writer of the literature review.

 The literature review won’t be original. To tackle this claim, let’s stay with idea of discovery for a moment more. If the review gets stuck describing studies one after another instead of presenting an argument, this will be true. The literature review won’t be original since it will simply recount what already exists. What the literature review needs to do is put forward a view on why this material matters – that is what will be original. As we dig into the body of existing work in our field, that is what we should be seeking to discover – what we think about what everyone else has said. And how do we come up with that? By identifying patterns and trends in previous work and figuring out how they add up to the need to ask our question. 

 A concrete example might help. When I was writing my analysis of the character Gus in Harold Pinter’s play The Dumb Waiter, I found that there were many, many existing analyses on this play. Why did the world need one more? Why should anyone be interested in what I had to say about the play? When I dug into the existing studies, I noticed an interesting pattern – most of them were concerned with the same two or three scenes and as a result offered generally convergent analyses, variations on narrow set of similar themes. Bingo❗There it was. Why did the world need my analysis of The Dumb Waiter? Because I offered a careful look at neglected scenes and was able to put forward a new reading of Gus by doing so. 

🔑 The key take away? Identifying patterns and trends in previous findings is a key skill in doing a literature review, a skill that will help lift the review out of description and into original analysis. 

So how do you enable students to do this? 

•  Some of my previous blogs, which go over practical tips, might be of interest -- click through and have look: Your Literature Review Is an Argument; Your Literature Review is Like a Qualitative Research Project; Reverse Engineering a Review. 

• If you like what you find, are UK-based and want to go further, contact me to discuss a workshop on How to Really Write Your Literature Review (available as 2-hour master classes; 4-hour in-depth sessions; 1 day intensives; and 2-day courses). 

• Hop onto my website or connect on LinkedIn and drop me a message.

I would love to hear from you. 😊

Listening to Your Drafts: Insights for Students and Supervisors

As I look back on my writing about writing, I realise there is something I sometimes say without much explanation: we need to know how to listen to our drafts. So in this blog, I am going to tell you a bit more about what I mean by that.  If you are currently working on your literature review, the practical examples I give here may help you develop your own listening process. If you are supporting other researchers with their literature reviews, these insights may help you when it comes to giving feedback, as this technique is useful whether we are listening to our own draft or someone else's.  

First, let's quickly review Huff's (1983)* three phases of drafting. Phase 1 is the generative phase, when you get your ideas down on paper in whatever way works for you. This is a relatively unmonitored phase when you actively want to encourage your ideas to tumble out, one after the other. In this phase, you can give your stream of consciousness free reign without worrying about grammar, punctuation, or spelling. Just get your ideas down.  

Phase 2 is the more disciplined problem-solving phase, when you need to start sorting, sifting, and evaluating these ideas. Do you have an argument yet? Do you need to read more? Are you fairly considering the evidence or cherry-picking? When you sit down to write your first solid draft, are you making progress? Why or why not? Are you writing for hours at a stretch but just describing what others have said? It is during phase 2 that writing and active critical thinking come together and reinforce each other. 

Phase 3 is the editing phase, when you dot the i's, cross the t's, and look up the rules on using semi-colons for the hundredth time. While phase 3 generally should be done last and can, depending on the size of your document, be done in one sitting, phases 1 and 2 are not strictly speaking linear (you may drop back into phase 1 for a bit after starting phase 2) and will generally be done over multiple sittings. 

The listening I refer to here occurs in the second phase of drafting as part of the essential problem-solving process. Listening, of course, is metaphorical, as what I am really talking about is the act of noticing specific things in your writing that crop up when you are drafting and paying attention to what these things may be trying to reveal to you about your own argument or writing process. This feels like an act of listening to me when I engage in it, so that is what I call it. In the rest of this blog, I'll outline four things that might crop up when you draft and why you might want to listen to them in the way I suggest here.

Repeating Things: Any time you keep repeating something, such as an idea, a quote, a question,  or a position in a debate, pay attention.  When something like this crops up again and again, and insists on inserting itself even when you set out to write about something else, it is an indication that you need to think more about it. Simply removing repetition may feel like progress, but in order to truly resolve this you need to know why you keep repeating it. In my experience, repetition of this kind tends to occur for two reasons: 1) you haven't yet nailed down the steps in your argument, so your account is beginning to meander; or 2) you have hit on something important, but you haven't figured out why it is important yet. In the first case, sort your argument out and the repetition will most likely take care of itself -- the thing you are repeating will slot into the place it should go, and you will stop repeating it. If it is the second case, think carefully about this thing that you keep repeating. Is it important evidence you haven't considered yet? Is it something that disturbs the framework you have thus far assembled? In such cases, we might keep pushing a thought away because it is inconvenient, but back it comes, in the form of repetition, demanding to be dealt with. Listen to it. 

Asserting What You Are NOT Doing: Any time you declare My purpose is NOT to X; or This section will NOT go into Y, pay attention to that, especially early on in the second phase of drafting. Often, we set out with a certain structure in mind and the temptation is to stick to that structure. But early in our drafting new things emerge because we are still collecting information. The new information may at first look irrelevant, so we loftily declare there is no need for us to go into it. Later, however, it turns out that the thing we dismissed as most definitely NOT our purpose turns out to be the key to our whole argument. The early decision to dismiss it came about not because the idea was truly irrelevant, but because the structure of our argument was not yet complete. There are, or course, times when you do need to state that you won't be dealing with something, but that decision should be made when you are pretty sure you are finished with the second phase of drafting, not at the start of it.

Things That Come Out as Brief Asides: These are ideas that make their first appearance in your draft as though they are unimportant. They come out as quips on the far side of a dash, or comments in parentheses, or items shunted into subordinate clauses. Pay attention to these. While it may seem counter-intuitive, these seemingly dashed off things often turn out to be the key to something important -- an avenue you need to pursue or an aspect of your topic that turns out to be crucial.  They make their first appearance tentatively, but that is all the more reason to stop and pay attention to them. Try foregrounding them -- give them their very own sentences, start paragraphs with them, and see what happens. Have you learned something new about your argument? Pursue it. If, towards the end of your drafting, these things do turn out to be superfluous, by all means delete them. But do this because of a conscious decision, not because of an assumption. 

You Suddenly Become Overly Discursive: When we are secure in what we think, our prose tends to be clear. If we are still grappling with new ideas, our prose rambles. You can, for example, write There are four books on the table. Clear, confident, done -- you've said what you needed to say. Or, you might write Well, I was in the library, it was the afternoon and it was after lunch when I was just coming back and I saw this table. Oh, and I noticed some books. Four, I think. This is overly discursive, and notice that the important bits appear only as after thoughts. When you catch episodes like this in your draft, trying to simply edit them won't work because what you really need to do is improve your understanding of something. Do more reading, attend more lectures, nail down the point of confusion and then start re-writing. The greater your understanding, the clearer your prose.

* Huff, R. 1983. 'Teaching Revision: A Model of the Drafting Process'. College English 45 (6): 800-816.

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