Sideshadowing: A Strategy for Revision

Beth Carroll
English Department

The idea

You might be familiar with the literary term, "foreshadowing," which concerns itself with indicating or suggesting beforehand a later revelation or significant moment in a text. Sideshadowing, by contrast, focuses attention onto the shadows of the present moment, asking what else might be lurking at the edges of a text, what is almost but not quite being said. Sometimes the most important and crucial ideas for a piece of writing are hovering at the margins, in the shadows, having not yet made their way into the words on the page. Looking at the sideshadowing in your writing, then, can be a useful revision strategy that allows you to see new possibilities for your paper through careful attention to what you have written and the hints of what you have left out.

As you read through your writing, you’ll want to pay close attention to conflicts and possibilities of each moment in the draft. Then, you’ll write back to yourself in the margins of your paper, developing untold or undertold ideas and stories, and considering the questions and reservations you have as you read. The idea is to create a thick marginal text that extends or raises questions about what your draft is saying. This text in the margins might help you generate new material for a future draft. And looking at the shadows of your writing will ultimately help you see more clearly what your text is already saying and indirectly indicating.

How it works

1.  Read through the first paragraph, considering the following questions, and write back to yourself in the margins of your paper:
 

2.  Move to the next paragraph, answering the above questions in the margins of your paper. Continue this process through each paragraph until you reach the end of the draft.

3.  After you have written back to yourself in the margins of each paragraph, read over all you have written. What does this new material tell you about your writing? How can you revise taking this the marginal text into consideration?
 
 

(Based on ideas from Nancy Welch and Gary Saul Morson)