I find the concept of riffing useful because it suggests what we hope to accomplish with much critical thinking and intellectual observation. The term riffing (which derives from the musical slang for repeated chord progressions within a work) externalizes ideas about an event that might seem whimsical but ultimately relate to a core theme, suggesting an awareness of situatedness within the culture and audience. A riff picks up on the themes of the original text or “through-line.” A worthwhile distinction here, one which sheds some light on the practice of riffing, is how it is distinguished from heckling. Whereas the latter tries to “destroy the text” by “fault finding,” the former offers an alternative that “settles over an existing text, creating a new thing, dependent on the previous work, but greater than it” (McWilliams and Richardson 113). - https://compositionforum.com/issue/33/riffing.php