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

2. “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

3. 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.

4. 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

5. 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

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

7. 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