[Matt]

A fanning motion is when your right forearm swings back and forth, with the right elbow almost as it's pivot center. I wrote a great post explaining this on Chuck's site a while back, but it isn't accessible at the moment. Hopefully I can get to it soon and post it here.

But basically, when you "fan" your right hand gets "to the right of" your right elbow from your perspective. When you use the Push stroke and it's linear, the right hand stays "to the left of" your right elbow.