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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