ABSTRACT
When, in 1979, I visited the Dutch phenomenologist Johan van den Berg in his home in a small picturesque medieval village in The Netherlands, I asked him about his writing practice. To my surprise, he opened drawers full of large index cards. He showed how he used 15x20 cm index cards to hand write paragraphs that were eventually organized into book pages and chapters, and finally typed on a typewriter. (Those were the days prior to personal computers.) He explained how he basically worked with drafts and how he would write and rewrite new insights that he came upon into longer paragraphs. Perhaps I was a bit stunned because that is how I had done my own writing ever since college, but I had imagined that a successful author like the famous phenomenologist van den Berg would immediately compose his texts in a straightforward fashion on a typewriter. At any rate, this informative visit to van den Berg’s private study and writing space convinced me that draft writing would be a good approach to take with my graduate students who want to learn and practice phenomenological inquiry.
