Ask your readers or listeners (if you read your paper outloud) to tell
you what's hovering at the edges of your paper. What ideas might be implied,
but not made explicit? Was there something they thought that would be said
that never got articulated? Did they have the feeling that you wanted to
say something else, or could have said something else, but didn't for some
reason?
The Benefits
Because writing often involves discovering or thinking through some new
(to the writer) idea or concept, very often the writer isn't writing only
to say what she thinks, but also to figure out what she thinks. Yet when
this happens, the need to communicate a belief or idea sometimes causes
a writer to turn away from a path or line of inquiry. Yet the path remains
hinted at or suggested, the idea it would lead to hovers between the lines,
often without the writing knowing its there. Sometimes too a writer will
make such rapid connnetions in her own mind that readers won't get the
full thinking. But the connections are implied, waiting to be explained
and developed. The Hovering exercise is a way for your review audience
to give you some indications of when these moments arise.
Using this Activity to Revise
This feedback really can open windows, sometimes on things you didn't know
you were thinking; sometimes on things you thought about so quickly, so
intuitively perhaps, or associationally, that you didn't know the uniqueness
of the connections your mind was making. Getting hovering feedback gives
you an indication of places you can go, things or thoughts you can add
to a next draft. It also gives you an indication of what makes your readers
curious, what they want to know more about or suspect that you had lurking
in your mind as you wrote. You can use this infomation both to guide revision
and to consider ideas for future writing projects and moments.