Close reading is the careful, sustained analysis of any text that focuses on significant details or patterns and that typically examines some aspect of the text’s form, craft, meanings, and more. The goal of close reading is to discover both (a) how a text makes meaning, and (b) what it means, in your interpretation. To accomplish this, we:
- Look closely at the language and rhetorical moves employed
- Explore patterns and themes we find
- Notice anything else we can about a text without using outside sources.
Reading methods that assist close reading:
- Read slowly and pay attention to each element on the page, down to the level of the punctuation.
- Reread a text several times to notice new elements
- Read it aloud – the arrangement and sequences of sounds matters and contributes to meaning
- Annotate, annotate, annotate! Mark important words, sounds, images, phrases, sections, anything you noticed while slowly reading and rereading and listening to the text.
Step 1: Larger questions of context
- What subjects does the work address?
- Who is the speaker?
- What is the work’s larger context?
- What genre are we dealing with?
Step 2: Questions about form and structure/organization:
- How is the work put together? If it’s a poem, what is its stanza-makeup? What kind of poem is it? Rhyme and meter? Sonnet or epic (or other type)? How does it scan?
- What devices like repetition, punctuation, or section divisions do you find?
- Is there a frame structure to consider?
- How does the work use white space?
- What typographical devices, if any, do you encounter?
Step 3: Look closely at the language in the piece:
- What kind of diction is used?
- What is the tone/mood of the piece?
- Which images stand out and why?
- Does the writer use figurative language? If so, how/where and what role does it play?
Step 5: Make a claim, an argument, about how the text works to generate a certain meaning. This is your thesis. Use your notes from answering the above questions to formulate a hypothesis about how a specific element of the text is significant to its meaning. Not everything you noticed will support your argument.
Activity: Get Local with Your Word for Close Reading Evidence
Select or use your pre-selected word. Zoom in on just the paragraph or the stanza in which that word appears. Read that paragraph or stanza very carefully and annotate it in order to discover connections that will constitute close reading evidence.
Use annotation to help you draw connections between:
- Your word and a major theme of the chapter.
- Your word and the action of the plot
- Your word and its position within the chapter, if that is significant. (It is especially if it falls in the first or last sentence.)
- Your word and the words around it in the paragraph at large.
- Your word and its position in its own sentence.
- Your word and figurative language. Is it figurative, a pun, or related to nearby figurative language?
- Your word and punctuation.
From these notes and brainstorms, what begins to emerge about how this word works to make meaning in its very local context?
Sources consulted and adapted: Purdue Owl’s “Close Reading Poetry: An Overview” https://docs.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=https://owl.english.purdue.edu/media/ppt/20090902102259_751.ppt
British Women's Writing of the Long 18th Century 