Close Reading Guidelines

Close Reading Guidelines 

Arthur Mervyn Close Reading due September 24.

Through close reading and writing about literature, you can develop strong analytic and argumentative skills.  To do a close reading, go back to the text (after you’ve finished reading the whole thing) and select a short passage (a paragraph is usually perfect) that you found particularly interesting, troubling, or important.  The issues at work in the short passage should tie in to and help illuminate some kind of broader question, concern, or pattern in the text.  Carefully reread and analyze the passage, looking up any words you don’t know well. You can access the Oxford English Dictionary on line through the Healey Library Website; I would recommend that you do this in order to see whether words had different, now lost, meanings in the nineteenth century.  A good close reading weaves together very close attention to the specific details and language of the passage with the larger issues of the text. 

Here are some things to consider (not all of these concerns apply to every passage!):

·      Tone: What is the tone of the passage?  How is that tone conveyed?

·      Point of View:  Whose point of view governs the passage?  What do you see—and what is obscured—through the lens of this point of view? What point(s) of view are left out or considered less important?

·      Language: Pay attention to the individual words in the passage.  What kinds of adjectives, verbs and adverbs appear?  How do they connect the passage to the text as a whole?  How does language help build a sense of character, setting, theme?  Think about the denotations (dictionary definitions) and connotations (associations) for key words.

·      Setting:  How do details describing the setting or environment function in the passage?  What does the setting say about the text’s characters?  its themes?

·      Characters: What facets of different characters/relationships surface in your passage?  Does your passage reveal anything surprising or expected about the character?

·      Dialogue: What does a character’s way of speaking reveal about that individual?  What about the interactions between characters?

Format: Retype the passage at the top of your first page.  Note the page number.  Quote ONLY from the passage you choose, and THOROUGHLY ANALYZE your quotes.  Make sure that you are making a clear point, and make sure that this point makes sense within the larger context of the book.  Your analysis will be at least twice as long as the passage.  In it, you should attend to the details of the text, and use your reading of the details to help you make a larger contention about a larger idea at work in the text.