What is it? Is it really important? Close Reading What is it? Is it really important?

“Every book has a skeleton hidden between its covers “Every book has a skeleton hidden between its covers. Your job as [close reader] is to find it.” Adler and Van Doren, 1940/1972

Close Reading: Defined Close reading is the careful process of determining what a text says explicitly and drawing logical inferences from it. Close Reading allows the reader to uncover layers of meaning to gain greater/deeper understanding.

Close Reading Requires: Understanding your purpose in reading Understanding the author’s purpose in writing Seeing ideas in a text as being interconnected Looking for and understanding systems of meaning Engage in a text while reading Getting beyond impressionist reading Formulating questions and seeing answers to those questions while reading

CLOSE READING Strategies Chunk the text (separate larger texts into smaller sections) Underline, circle, highlight, and mark with purpose Use left margin for summary of author’s thoughts Use right margin for deep thinking Ask questions and then find the answers

When asking higher-level questions, try this: USE LESS OF: USE MORE OF: What Why When How Where Suppose Who Justify Which Example

Your relationship with close reading -- This class is based on analysis and deeper understanding of texts -- You shall not ask, “do we need to annotate/close read?” when given assignments – you should already know the answer will be “yes”  -- we want to make sure we are not killing literature through annotating/close reading, but rather the opposite: bring the literature to life through it -- I know you probably haven’t annotated/had much practice with close reading, but you’ll get plenty here and become better at it as we go