If you attended the Westport Arts Center's November 11, 2010 performance and readings of memoir contest works about war, I could tell you that all of these works in the original written form didn't have the dramatic core well integrated into the medium—which is often just a difference in writing a 1500 essay for print only, and writing for listeners.  The authors all  had stories to tell, and luckily they were open to having some of their work revised—the way editors revise. But this is performance work, and playwrights rarely give the director/producer carte blanche for narrative progression.

However, I can easily demonstrate how if you're a writer, listening to your own work matters. I will be uploading the audio for both the October 17, 2010 readings and the Veterans Day readings next week, and you'll easily be able to feel how if you "read" your work aloud, you'll get the maximum bang for you ink-buck.

When I was an editor in a large noisy newsroom, I use to make my reporters read their stories aloud before they filed them for editing.  At 5 pm for a morning newspaper, there was always a low hum in the clicking clacking computer terminal humming newsroom—ten or twelve people yakking away to themselves —as if they were talking on a cell phone on a Manhattan street corner. But here's the thing they all learned: You can be the best writer in the world, but you may have less than perfect pitch in your ear. No problem. If you read your work aloud, you will hear where you need to change up sentences, move descriptors, and "ings" and "howevers," and all sorts of tricks to make the music of what you write sing louder. It can't hurt. Try it.