If you’ve got any desire to see my ugly mug on youtube, here’s your chance! In the video posted below I explain a great revision strategy called sideshadowing.  I learned and adapted this writing technique from my former teacher Nancy Welch.  As an aside, Nancy also happens to be a phenomenal scholar, professor, fiction writer and activist.  Her book Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World helped shape part of my thesis, and her short stories aren’t too shabby, either!

This short activity gets authors responding to their own work in the margins (or as I prefer in the video, in a separate document).  I use this exercise with nearly all of my drafts as I have a tendency to ramble and to easily take my ideas to unintended places.  While the freedom to explore in early drafts can help generate new and interesting ideas, sideshadowing challenges me to see how those ideas work toward one of the larger purposes of the paper (assuming I’ve figured that out, too).

I am currently using sideshadowing to revise a cultural feature on fiction depicting the American suburbs of the mid-twentieth century.  After I write on a separate page short summaries and quick statements about how a particular section works toward a thesis, I can look at my list and easily re-order sections that are linked thematically (I have a tendency to write first drafts ordered by novel, and this exercise helps me organize them in more effective ways).  I’ve also noticed from my sideshadow list that some of my ideas are much stronger and more developed than others, so I’ve begun to think about editing and deleting some of the smaller tangential paragraphs (or employing them as foot or endnotes).

More than anything, I use this revision activity to find the places where connections to my thesis/purpose are not explicit enough.  These are the places where the links and connections to my larger purpose are obvious to me but perhaps not to others.  By sideshadowing, I can locate places where it would be effective to gently remind the reader how this idea supports, or is otherwise significant, to my main argument or purpose.  I think of a thesis like a coda or refrain in music; there may be various different sub-points under it, but it’s important to have that chorus line pop up periodically, to signal to the reader how ideas refer back to an overarching idea or set of ideas.

Perhaps when I finally get around to uploading one of my finished features I will also upload my early drafts with sideshadow notes, so I can better show I how move from rambling, unorganized early drafts to cohesive, developed final drafts.