Introduction
Close reading is the practice of actively reading a text, looking for specific details, and then interpreting those details. The basic three step process for close reading is to annotate the text while reading, look for patterns among annotations, and interrogate the patterns by asking how and why? Through close reading, we are able to move beyond the surface level first read to draw more nuanced conclusions about a literary text. If you take this practice outside of ENG 134 to other courses you’re taking, you’ll also notice that close reading will help you engage with any type of reading (news, textbooks, personal reading, etc) to gain new insights and critically evaluate everyday messages.
Note that as you read through some of these materials, you will most likely encounter words you don’t know or use often. It will be worth your time to look these words up as you find them. Keep your phone or dictionary handy to look up words, jot down definitions, and understand their use in context. This will not be the last time you see many of these words, so take a couple extra minutes to learn them now.
How to do a close reading
The process of writing an essay usually begins with the close reading of a text. Of course, the writer’s personal experience may occasionally come into the essay, and all essays depend on the writer’s own observations and knowledge. But most essays, especially academic essays, begin with a close reading of some kind of text—a painting, a movie, an event—and usually with that of a written text. When you close read, you observe facts and details about the text. You may focus on a particular passage, or on the text as a whole. Your aim may be to notice all striking features of the text, including rhetorical features, structural elements, cultural references; or, your aim may be to notice only selected features of the text—for instance, oppositions and correspondences, or particular historical references. Either way, making these observations constitutes the first step in the process of close reading.
The second step is interpreting your observations. What we’re basically talking about here is inductive reasoning: moving from the observation of particular facts and details to a conclusion, or interpretation, based on those observations. And, as with inductive reasoning, close reading requires careful gathering of data (your observations) and careful thinking about what these data add up to.
How to Begin:
1. Read with a pencil in hand, and annotate the text.
“Annotating” means underlining or highlighting key words and phrases—anything that strikes you as surprising or significant, or that raises questions—as well as making notes in the margins. When we respond to a text in this way, we not only force ourselves to pay close attention, but we also begin to think with the author about the evidence—the first step in moving from reader to writer.
Here’s a sample passage by anthropologist and naturalist Loren Eiseley. It’s from his essay called “The Hidden Teacher.”
. . . I once received an unexpected lesson from a spider. It happened far away on a rainy morning in the West. I had come up a long gulch looking for fossils, and there, just at eye level, lurked a huge yellow-and-black orb spider, whose web was moored to the tall spears of buffalo grass at the edge of the arroyo. It was her universe, and her senses did not extend beyond the lines and spokes of the great wheel she inhabited. Her extended claws could feel every vibration throughout that delicate structure. She knew the tug of wind, the fall of a raindrop, the flutter of a trapped moth’s wing. Down one spoke of the web ran a stout ribbon of gossamer on which she could hurry out to investigate her prey.
Curious, I took a pencil from my pocket and touched a strand of the web. Immediately there was a response. The web, plucked by its menacing occupant, began to vibrate until it was a blur. Anything that had brushed claw or wing against that amazing snare would be thoroughly entrapped. As the vibrations slowed, I could see the owner fingering her guidelines for signs of struggle. A pencil point was an intrusion into this universe for which no precedent existed. Spider was circumscribed by spider ideas; its universe was spider universe. All outside was irrational, extraneous, at best raw material for spider. As I proceeded on my way along the gully, like a vast impossible shadow, I realized that in the world of spider I did not exist.
2. Look for patterns in the things you’ve noticed about the text—repetitions, contradictions, similarities.
What do we notice in the previous passage? First, Eiseley tells us that the orb spider taught him a lesson, thus inviting us to consider what that lesson might be. But we’ll let that larger question go for now and focus on particulars—we’re working inductively. In Eiseley’s next sentence, we find that this encounter “happened far away on a rainy morning in the West.” This opening locates us in another time, another place, and has echoes of the traditional fairy tale opening: “Once upon a time . . .”. What does this mean? Why would Eiseley want to remind us of tales and myth? We don’t know yet, but it’s curious. We make a note of it.
Details of language convince us of our location “in the West”—gulch, arroyo, and buffalo grass. Beyond that, though, Eiseley calls the spider’s web “her universe” and “the great wheel she inhabited,” as in the great wheel of the heavens, the galaxies. By metaphor, then, the web becomes the universe, “spider universe.” And the spider, “she,” whose “senses did not extend beyond” her universe, knows “the flutter of a trapped moth’s wing” and hurries “to investigate her prey.” Eiseley says he could see her “fingering her guidelines for signs of struggle.” These details of language, and others, characterize the “owner” of the web as thinking, feeling, striving—a creature much like ourselves. But so what?
3. Ask questions about the patterns you’ve noticed—especially how and why.
To answer some of our own questions, we have to look back at the text and see what else is going on. For instance, when Eiseley touches the web with his pencil point—an event “for which no precedent existed”—the spider, naturally, can make no sense of the pencil phenomenon: “Spider was circumscribed by spider ideas.” Of course, spiders don’t have ideas, but we do. And if we start seeing this passage in human terms, seeing the spider’s situation in “her universe” as analogous to our situation in our universe (which we think of as the universe), then we may decide that Eiseley is suggesting that our universe (the universe) is also finite, that our ideas are circumscribed, and that beyond the limits of our universe there might be phenomena as fully beyond our ken as Eiseley himself—that “vast impossible shadow”—was beyond the understanding of the spider.
But why vast and impossible, why a shadow? Does Eiseley mean God, extra-terrestrials? Or something else, something we cannot name or even imagine? Is this the lesson? Now we see that the sense of tale telling or myth at the start of the passage, plus this reference to something vast and unseen, weighs against a simple E.T. sort of interpretation. And though the spider can’t explain, or even apprehend, Eiseley’s pencil point, that pencil point is explainable—rational after all. So maybe not God. We need more evidence, so we go back to the text—the whole essay now, not just this one passage—and look for additional clues. And as we proceed in this way, paying close attention to the evidence, asking questions, formulating interpretations, we engage in a process that is central to essay writing and to the whole academic enterprise: in other words, we reason toward our own ideas.
Patricia Kain, Writing Center at Harvard University. https://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/pages/how-do-close-reading
Close Reading Detective Work
Close reading is a cornerstone of literature classes, but it can be a drag to teach. The excitement I sometimes feel about finding new and contradictory meanings for words a little difficult to translate to the average non-major (and even the average major). So this semester I decided to frame my close reading lesson in terms of detective work. Specifically, I decided to show them about fifteen minutes’ worth an episode of the BBC drama Sherlock.
Here’s my reasoning. Sherlock is a rather eccentric “private consultant” with an uncanny ability to interpret crime scenes. He is able to do this through his well-honed powers of observation, which allow him to infer a shocking amount of information about people, places, and things. For example, upon his first meeting with his partner Dr. Watson, Sherlock is immediately able to tell that Watson is an Iraq war veteran who suffers from PTSD and has an estranged sibling. This close attention to detail makes Sherlock interesting to us, but intolerable to those around him (and this of course is the pleasure of watching the show).
Like detective work, close reading requires a sharp attention to detail. The opening lines and stage directions of a play like Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, for example, tell us almost everything we need to know about the main character. But it is a skill to be able to infer this much from just a few details. For one thing, it takes a lot of patience with the text. It also, as I mentioned above, requires the ability to focus in on details that might appear to be insignificant. And finally, it involves a kind of confidence–confidence in the text to be able to produce meaning that goes “deeper” than initially apparent, and confidence in one’s own reading ability and “sense” of the text. Though I would have hated to hear this myself in my late teens and early twenties, I always tell my class to follow their intuition or “hunches” about the text. Without the willingness to take this kind of interpretive risk, you end up with the dreaded “um, I think we might be reading too much into this.” I try to discourage that kind of thinking by telling my class that any kind of interpretation, no matter how wild, is valid as long as they can back it up convincingly with evidence.
I guess, then, that I try to teach my class to assume a particular kind of attitude toward the text. While I am always careful to lay out the historical context of any work that we’re reading, I also think it’s important to encourage them to “read into” the text. This demonstrates to them that meaning is something that they can learn how to create, rather than something they’ve simply inherited from the critics and readers before them.
Close Reading English/Language Arts and History/Social Studies
Disciplinary Literacy for Deeper Learning MOOC-Ed. (October 9, 2014) Close Reading English/Language Arts and History/Social Studies [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoPtpdMcNcc
Summary
As you’ve seen through this activity, close reading is a fairly simple three step process that yields great results. Though the steps are straightforward (annotate, look for patterns, question patterns), the practice takes time and practice to develop. As you saw in the examples, each person’s close reading will be slightly different based on their academic experience, their interest in the piece, and their focus of investigation. This variety emphasizes the value of close reading. As each of us uncovers new insights in the literature we read for class, we will strengthen our collective experience of the class reading and our interactions with each other.
Continue to practice close reading in ENG 134 and beyond the classroom as well. Close reading will benefit you throughout your college experience and also in your everyday life. Close readers are able to spot discrepancies in bills, question new legislation, think critically about news, and succeed academically.
