What is close reading in reading?

In literary criticism, close reading is the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of a text. A close reading emphasizes the single and the particular over the general, effected by close attention to individual words, the syntax, the order in which the sentences unfold ideas, as well as formal structures.[1] A truly attentive close reading means thinking about both what is being said in a passage (the content), and how it is being said (the form, i.e. the manner in which the content is presented) and leading it to possibilities for observation and insight.

Literary close reading and commentaries have extensive precedent in the exegesis of religious texts, and more broadly, hermeneutics of ancient works. For example, Pazand, a genre of middle Persian literature, refers to the Zend (literally: 'commentary'/'translation') texts that offer explanation and close reading of the Avesta, the sacred texts of Zoroastrianism.[2] The scriptural commentaries of the Talmud offer a commonly cited early predecessor to close reading.[3] In Islamic studies, the close reading of the Quran has flourished and produced an immense corpus.[4] But the closest religious analogy to contemporary literary close reading, and the principal historical connection with its birth, is the rise of the higher criticism, and the evolution of textual criticism of the Bible in Germany in the late eighteenth century.

In the practice of literary studies, the technique of close reading emerged in 1920s Britain in the work of I. A. Richards, his student William Empson, and the poet T.S. Eliot, all of whom sought to replace an "impressionistic" view of literature then dominant with what Richards called a "practical criticism" focused on language and form. American New Critics in the 1930s and 1940s anchored their views in similar fashion, and promoted close reading as a means of understanding that the autonomy of the work (often a poem) mattered more than anything else, including authorial intention, the cultural contexts of reception, and most broadly, ideology.[5] For these critics, including Cleanth Brooks, William K. Wimsatt, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate, only close reading, because of its attentiveness to the nuances and interrelation of language and form, could address the work in its complex unity.[6] Their influence on American literary criticism and English departments held sway for several decades, and even after New Criticism faded from prominence in American universities in the waning years of the Cold War,[7] close reading remained a fundamental, almost naturalized, skill amongst literary critics.[8][9][10] By the turn of the 21st century, efforts to historicize New Critical aesthetics and its apolitical pretense prompted scholars, especially in departments of English, to debate the fate of close reading, asking about its status as a critical practice.

In two of its 2010 bulletins, the Association of Departments of English (ADE) featured a cluster of articles that attempted to take stock of what the 21st century held for close reading. The articles were motivated, as all of the scholars remarked, by the changes they had observed in the work of their colleagues and students—as well as in contemporary culture—that made them think again about why close reading mattered to the study of literature. Jonathan Culler noted that because the discipline had taken close reading for granted, it had disappeared from discussions of the goals of literary criticism.[11] For Culler, as for Jane Gallop, that absence needed remedying, and therefore signaled an opportunity for departments of English to renew—in order to capitalize on—one of the more distinctive traits of studying literature.[12] If New Criticism and its isolationist stance had given way to the politicization of literary studies, and if technological developments were changing the very ways in which people read, Culler and Gallop emphasized that the signature of close reading, meticulous attention to the workings of language and form, still had value. N. Katherine Hayles and John Guillory, meanwhile, each interested in the impact of digital media on the ways people read, argued that close reading skills were not only translatable to the digital context, but could also exist productively alongside the hyper-reading that web interfaces and links had generated.[13][14]

While New Criticism popularized close reading in universities, it tended to emphasize its principles and offer extended examples rather than prescribe specific methods and practices. This tendency towards what Vincent B. Leitch calls "canonical statements"[6] appeared in essays and book-length studies, from John Crowe Ransom's "The New Criticism" (1941) and Allen Tate's "A Note on Autotelism" (1949), to Cleanth Brooks' The Well Wrought Urn (1947),[15] Rene Wellek and Austin Warren's Theory of Literature (1949),[16] and W.K. Wimsatt's The Verbal Icon (1954).[17] The first ten chapters of The Well Wrought Urn thus focus individually on poems across British literary history (John Donne, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, W.B. Yeats, and T.S. Eliot) before concluding with "The Heresy of Paraphrase", in which Brooks abstracts the premises on which his analyses rest. Meanwhile, when Wellek and Warren describe their preference for an "intrinsic" study of literature in Theory of Literature, they refer to examples of elements they claim are crucial to a work—from euphony, rhythm, and meter to image, metaphor, and myth—and cite concrete examples of these drawn from literary history, but do not indicate steps by which readers might translate such thinking into their own analyses. Wimsatt takes a mixed approach in The Verbal Icon, combining theoretical chapters ("The Intentional Fallacy", "The Affective Fallacy") with those that discuss concerns he feels are necessary to the study of poetry ("The Concrete Universal", "Symbol and Metaphor", "The Substantive Level", "One Relation of Rhyme to Reason", "When is Variation 'Elegant'?", "Verbal Style: Logical and Counterlogical"), but he too leaves it to his readers to imagine how they might deploy these views.

As Culler notes in his essay for the 2010 bulletin of the American Departments of English, this tendency not to make statements of method meant that most students of the New Critics learned by example. Thus in the New Critical classroom, "the charismatic pedagogue could pose a question you had not thought of about relations between form and meaning or point to a textual difficulty that had escaped your attention."[18] More than fifty years later, this "closeness of close reading" remains vital to the work of more recent thinkers whose thinking has contributed to the radical changes in literary studies and displaced New Criticism. Of these he cites his contemporary, the deconstructionist Barbara Johnson, who stands out for her claim that the value of close reading lies in its capacity for taking seriously what does not immediately make sense.[19] Well aware of the stark differences between New Criticism and deconstruction, Culler here brings the two together, suggesting that their shared investments indicate an understanding of close reading worth maintaining.

In French criticism, close reading is similar to explication de texte, the tradition of textual interpretation in literary study, as proposed by Gustave Lanson. As an analytical technique, close reading compares and contrasts the concept of distant reading, the technique for "understanding literature, not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data", as described, by Kathryn Schulz, in "What is Distant Reading?", an article about the literary scholar Franco Moretti.[20]

Brooks's discussion of John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" embodies his use of close reading. In "Keats's Sylvan Historian", he finds the controversy over the poem's famous lines misplaced, and insists instead that "the ambiguity" of "Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" is best understood as an expression of the urn itself (151–153). The poem pursues this ambiguity, he writes, in lines that describe the urn on the one hand as a "bride of quietness" and a "foster-child of silence" and on the other, a "sylvan historian" (155). In this way the poem describes the urn in paradoxical terms much as the urn utters a paradoxical line. Brooks then pursues this logic by considering how "sylvan historian" might not only describe the urn as a kind of historian but also the kind of history the urn is said to tell. Further, if he claims that this history is uncertain because it's not clear "what men or gods" feature in it, he continues that line of thinking as he proceeds through the ode's stanzas: when he emphasizes that the "unheard melodies" of the figures depicted on the urn's face are "sweeter than any audible music", that "action goes on though the actors are motionless", that "the maiden, always to be kissed, never actually kissed", that the "boughs...cannot shed their leaves", and when he claims that this "ironic undercurrent" only increases over the course of the poem, to culminate in those infamous lines (156–159, 164). From following the poem in this way, Brooks arrives at the assertion that his interpretation is "derived from the context of the "Ode" itself" (164).

Brooks's close reading is typical of the New Critical investment in the textual object alone. Yet scholars have also found close reading productive for more politically and socially invested work, thereby refusing the New Critical belief in literary transcendence while seizing on the care with which it treated textuality. In The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), best known as one of the earliest statements of feminist literary criticism, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar deployed close reading to make a case for the distinctiveness of the female literary imagination. The sixteen chapters of Madwoman thus pursue their arguments—that women writers expressed their anxiety about authorship, their rage over being constrained to docile femininity, their canny encoding of their patriarchal critique—with the attention to language, imagery, and form Gilbert and Gubar had been trained to wield as graduate students in the late 1960s. New Critical echoes are thus evident in the individual chapters devoted to close readings of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Bronte's The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette, but so is the political innovation. Reviewers—academic and mainstream—recognized this trait, describing the two scholars as "gnostic heretics who claim to have found the secret code that unlocks the mysteries in old texts" (Schreiber 11)[21] and their interpretations as a "skillful joint peeling away of the layers" of women's writing" (129).[22]

In an even more extreme example, Jacques Derrida in Ulysses Gramophone devotes eighty-six pages to the word "yes" in James Joyce's novel Ulysses, an effort which J. Hillis Miller describes as a "hyperbolic, extravagant, even outrageous explosion" of the technique of close reading.[23]

The push for more close-reading instruction in primary and secondary education is partially due to increased feedback from college professors in the early-mid 2000s that students were arriving in university classrooms with few comprehension skills.[24] The increased demand for students to acquire concrete skills in high school that they would need in transitioning to higher education and to adult life culminated in the creation of the Common Core State Standards in 2009.[25] Since then, there has been a push for English language arts (ELA) teachers, especially at the secondary level, to help students develop close-reading strategies. Several of the ELA standards for reading literature require students to be able to cite direct textual evidence, and to analyze words in context. For example, CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.4 asks students to "Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the cumulative impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone (e.g., how the language evokes a sense of time and place; how it sets a formal or informal tone)."[26]

Today, as most states have adopted the Common Core Standards,[27] there is an increasing number of resources designed to help teachers instruct and implement close-reading strategies in their classrooms. In 2012, Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst published Notice & Note: Strategies for Close Reading, which established six "signposts" that alert readers to significant moments in a work of literature and encourage students to read closely.[28]

Another resource, developed by Beth Burke (NBCT) for the Tampa Bay Times NIE (Newspaper in Education), presents the steps involved in close reading and how to scaffold the strategies for students. She recommends using the "gradual release model"[29] in instruction, beginning by modeling a close reading in front of the class, then having students work on the strategy in groups before attempting it alone.

Additional ways students are supported in close-reading instruction include providing graphic organizers that help them group their ideas with textual evidence.[30] Many other educational resources and guides to close reading exist in order to help students of all levels and in particular, close reading poetry. For example, see The Close Reading of Poetry: A Practical Introduction and Guide to Explication.[31]

Since the introduction of the Common Core State Standards in the US, close reading has become a widely used approach in teaching comprehension. Snow and Connor (2016) define close reading as “an approach to teaching comprehension that insists students extract meaning from text by examining carefully how language is used in the passage itself” (p. 1).

The main intention of close reading is to engage students in the reading of complex texts. Fisher, Frey and Hattie (2016, p. 89) outline four elements to support close reading:

The premise here is that the students need to be able to answer text-based related questions. That is, that critical reading of the text is based on what is in the text, not on what the reader might bring to the text creating a ‘level playing field’ for all students.

Snow and O’Connor (2016) question this notion, stating that readers of all ages struggle when there is a “lack of background knowledge and lack of familiarity with key vocabulary and low-frequency academic language constructions”. (See Snow & O’Connor for a further discussion of the limitations of close reading).

In this video the teacher focuses closely on the descriptive language the author has used that convey emotions and give a sense of place. The teacher uses the discussion to check the students’ level of understanding.

In this video the teacher focuses closely on the descriptive language the author has used to convey emotions and give a sense of place. The teacher uses the discussion to check the students’ level of understanding.

Snow and O’Connor (2016) caution against reliance on close reading as a teaching strategy but suggest that it should be “embedded within the larger motivational context of deep comprehension of complex and engaging topics” (p. 6).

That is, close reading should complement and be integrated into students’ learning across the curriculum as they read, analyse and, most importantly, discuss a wide range of texts which open up new content, new concepts, and understandings about language.

Fang (2016) outlines different models of close reading highlighting models which help students to analyse language and patterns in texts in ways which support comprehension and interpretation.

Like Snow and O’Connor, Fang (2016) suggests that models of close reading should aim to develop “engaged readers who are able to comprehend, compose, converse about, and evaluate complex texts in thoughtful, critical ways” (p. 109).

Close reading should:

Close reading activities include:

For more info, see Modelling the text

by Grant Wiggins, Ed.D, Authentic Education

On May 26, 2015, Grant Wiggins passed away. Grant was tremendously influential on TeachThought’s approach to education, and we were lucky enough for him to contribute his content to our site. Occasionally, we are going to go back and re-share his most memorable posts. So today and tomorrow we’re going to share two of his posts on literacy, starting with what it means to ‘close read.’ Per his usual, Grant took a deep dive on the topic, with lots of great examples.

What is close reading? As I said in my previous blog post, whatever it is it differs from a personal response to the text.

Here is what the Common Core ELA Standards say:

Students who meet the Standards readily undertake the close, attentive reading that is at the heart of understanding and enjoying complex works of literature. (p. 3)

Here is Anchor Standard 1:

Key Ideas and Details

1. Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text. (p. 10)

Here is how Nancy Boyles in an excellent Educational Leadership article defines it: “Essentially, close reading means reading to uncover layers of meaning that lead to deep comprehension.”

Thus, what “close reading” really means in practice is disciplined re-reading of inherently complex and worthy texts. As Tim Shanahan puts it, “Because challenging texts do not give up their meanings easily, it is essential that readers re-read such texts,” while noting that “not all texts are worth close reading.”

The close = re-read + worthy assumption here is critical: we assume that a rich text simply cannot be understood and appreciated by a single read, no matter how skilled and motivated the reader.

The next five ELA anchor standards make this clearer: we could not possibly analyze these varied aspects of the text simultaneously:

College readiness and close reading. Since a key rationale for the Common Core Standards is college readiness, let’s have a look at how college professors define it. Here is what Penn State professor Sophia McClennen says at the start of her extremely helpful resource with tips on close reading:

“Reading closely” means developing a deep understanding and a precise interpretation of a literary passage that is based first and foremost on the words themselves. But a close reading does not stop there; rather, it embraces larger themes and ideas evoked and/or implied by the passage itself.

Here is how the Harvard Writing Center defines it:

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.

A University of Washington handout for students summarizes the aim of close reading as follows:

The goal of any close reading is the following:

Remember—when doing a close reading, the goal is to closely analyze the material and explain why details are significant. Therefore, close reading does not try to summarize the author’s main points, rather, it focuses on ‘picking apart’ and closely looking at the what the author makes his/her argument, why is it interesting, etc.

Here are a few of the helpful questions to consider in close reading, from the handout by Kip Wheeler, a college English professor:

II. Vocabulary and Diction:

III. Discerning Patterns:

Of note is that in all these college examples the focus is on close reading as a prelude to writing. This is an important heads-up for students: close reading invariably is a means to an end in college, where the aim is a carefully-argued work of original thought about the text(s). And, in fact, the second part of Anchor Standard #1 makes this link explicit: the expectation is that students will communicate the fruits of their close reading to others in written and oral forms.

A key assumption implicit in all these quotes as well as in the Common Core – a controversial one, perhaps – is thus what I briefly argued in the previous post: ‘close reading’ has implicit priority over ‘reader response’ views of the aim of literacy instruction. The reader’s primary obligation is to understand the text. That emphasis is clear from the anchor standards in the Common Core, as noted above: the goal is to understand what the author is doing and accomplishing, and what it means; the goal is not to respond personally to what the author is doing.

As I noted in my previous post, this does not mean, however, that we should ignore or try to bypass the reader’s responses, prior knowledge, or interests. On the contrary, reading cannot help but involve an inter-mingling of our experience and what the author says and perhaps means. But it does not follow from this fact that instruction should give equal weight to personal reactions to a text when the goal is close reading. On the contrary: we must constantly be alert to how and where our own prejudices (literally, pre-judging) may be interfering with meaning-making of the text.

Here is how the caution is cast in a college handout (ed note: the link is now broken and removed) on close reading for students:

One word of caution: context needs to be examined with care. Don’t assume that the context of your own class or gender or culture is informing you correctly. Read context as actively and as rigorously as you read text!

This is especially true when reading rich, unusual, and controversial writings. Our job is to suspend judgment as we read – and be wary of projecting our own prior experience.

Let me offer one of my favorite sections of text to illustrate the point – two early sections from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil:

SUPPOSING that Truth is a woman–what then? Is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women–that the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman?…

5. That which causes philosophers to be regarded half-distrustfully and half-mockingly, is not the oft-repeated discovery how innocent they are–how often and easily they make mistakes and lose their way, in short, how childish and childlike they are,–but that there is not enough honest dealing with them, whereas they all raise a loud and virtuous outcry when the problem of truthfulness is even hinted at in the remotest manner. They all pose as though their real opinions had been discovered and attained through the self-evolving of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic (in contrast to all sorts of mystics, who, fairer and foolisher, talk of “inspiration”), whereas, in fact, a prejudiced proposition, idea, or “suggestion,” which is generally their heart’s desire abstracted and refined, is defended by them with arguments sought out after the event. They are all advocates who do not wish to be regarded as such, generally astute defenders, also, of their prejudices, which they dub “truths,”–and VERY far from having the conscience which bravely admits this to itself, very far from having the good taste of the courage which goes so far as to let this be understood, perhaps to warn friend or foe, or in cheerful confidence and self-ridicule.

This is a classic close reading challenge: one has to read and re-read to make sense of things – even though all the words are familiar. And one has to put many prejudices and associations aside – about august philosophers, about scholarship, about “reason,” about truth and our motives in seeking it, about manhood! – to understand and appreciate what Nietzsche is driving at.

Oh, c’mon Grant: I teach little kids! No matter. The same close reading needs to be done with every Frog and Toad story. Let’s consider my favorite, “Spring.” Frog wants Toad to wake up from hibernation to play on a nice April spring day. Toad resists all entreaties to wake up and play. The climax of the story comes here:

“But, Toad,” cried Frog, “you will miss all the fun!”

“Listen, Frog” said Toad.  “How long have I been asleep?” “You have been asleep since November,” said Frog. “Well then,” said Toad, “a little more sleep will not hurt me.  Come back again and wake me up at about half past May.  Good night, Frog.” “But, Toad,’ said Frog, “I will be lonely until then.” Toad did not answer.  He had fallen asleep.

Frog looked at Toad’s calendar.  The November page was still on top. Frog tore off the November page. He tore off the December page. And the January page, the February page, and the March page.

He came to the April page.  Frog tore off the April page too. Then Frog ran back to Toad’s bed.  “Toad, Toad, wake up.  It is May now.”

“What?” said Toad.  “Can it be May so soon? “Yes,” said Frog.  “Look at your calendar.”

Toad looked at the calendar.  The May page was on top. “Why, it is May!” said Toad as he climbed out of bed.

Then he and Frog ran outside to see how the world was looking in the Spring.

All sorts of interesting questions can re-raised here – all of which demand a close (re-) reading:

Notice that we could ask the following reader-response-like questions:

A. Have you ever been tricked like that, or tricked someone else? Why did you trick them or they trick you?

B. Do real friends trick friends? Is Frog really being a good friend here?

From my vantage point, however, in light of what we have said so far, the first question pair is less fruitful to consider – less ‘close’ –  than the second pair. The first pair takes you away from the text; the second pair takes you right back to the text for a closer read.

The Openness Required In Close Reading

Close reading, then, requires openness to being taught. Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren in their seminal text How To Read A Book make this issue of openness quite explicit at the outset. When the goal is understanding (instead of enjoyment or information only), we must assume that there is something the writer grasps that we do not:

The writer is communicating something that can increase the reader’s understanding… What are the conditions under which this kind of reading – reading for understanding –takes place? There are two. First, there is an initial inequality in understanding. The writer must be “superior” to the reader in understanding…second, the reader must be able to overcome this inequality in some degree…To the extent that this equality is approached, clarity of communication is achieved.

In short, we can only learn from our “betters.” We must know who they are and how to learn from them. The person who possesses this sort of knowledge possesses the art of reading.

The essence of such open reading is active questioning of the text. As the authors say, the “one simple prescription is… Ask questions while you read – questions that you yourself must try to answer in the course of reading.”

Here are the four questions at the heart of the book:

What is the book about as a whole? You must try to discover the leading theme of the book, and how the author develops this theme in an orderly way…

What is being said in detail, and how? You must try to discover the main ideas, assertions, and arguments that constitute the author’s particular message.

Is the book true, in whole or in part? You cannot answer this question until you have answered the first two. You have to know what is being said before you can decide whether it is true or not. When you understand a book, however, you are obligated to make up your own mind. Knowing the author’s mind is not enough.

What of it? If the book has given you information, you must ask about its significance. Why does the author think it is important to know these things? Is it important to you to know them?

Note the caution: you shouldn’t jump to judging the merit or significance of the work before understanding it – a maxim of close reading.

The bulk of the book describes dozens of practical tips, with examples, for how to annotate texts and develop better habits of active reading in pursuit of the answers to these reader questions. I can heartily recommend How To Read a Book as one the best resources ever written for learning close reading. Hard to argue with the facts: written in 1940 and a longtime best-seller, it has had over 30 printings and is still used today.

Most importantly, to yours truly, How To Read a Book taught me how to read properly. It was in a brief skim of Adler’s book, while lounging in a friend’s dorm room when I was a junior at St. John’s College – the Great Books school – that I realized with a terrible shock that I had never really learned how to read actively and carefully up until that moment. The book changed my life: I became more skilled, confident, and willing as a reader; I went into teaching in part motivated by the simple yet powerful lessons taught me about the joys of reading and thinking in the book.

What St. John’s also taught me is the power of so-called Socratic Seminar – the way all of our classes were run – for learning close reading. Indeed, that’s all a good seminar is: a shared close reading of a complex text in which students propose emerging understandings, supported by textual evidence, with occasional reminders and re-direction by teacher-facilitators.

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."

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.

• Read with a pencil in hand, and annotate the text.
• Look for patterns in the things you've noticed about the text—repetitions, contradictions, similarities.
• Ask questions about the patterns you've noticed—especially how and why.

You may have encountered the term “close reading” in high school or university settings. It’s been thrown around a lot in recent years thanks to its inclusion in the Common Core Standards for K12 education in the United States.  But the practice of close reading has been around a lot longer than the Common Core, and at this point the term has been used in so many different contexts that its meaning has gotten a little muddled.

So how does the Common Core’s use of “close reading” compare to a literary scholar’s use of the term?

The Common Core Standard mentions citing “specific textual evidence” to “support conclusions drawn from the text,” and this could function as a very basic definition of “close reading” in the way that scholars conceive of the term.

For scholars, “close reading” is a mode of analysis—one of many possible modes, many of which can be used in conjunction with one another—that moves a reader beyond comprehension of the text to interpretation of the text.

A lot of the time we use close reading to uncover and explore a text’s underlying ideologies—or the ideas embedded in the text’s point of view, ideas that aren’t givens (like the laws of physics) but that are culturally or socially constructed, and usually ideas that aren’t universal even within a given culture or society.

We use close reading to make new knowledge out of our interactions with a text, which is why your instructors in high school and college might ask you to use close reading to write an essay, since the United States higher education system values the production of new knowledge.

So what does it look like to “do” close reading?

When you close read a text, you’re looking at both what the text says (its content), and how the text says what it says—through imagery, figurative language, motif, and so on.  You might have noticed that the OSU Guide to Literary Terms includes videos on imagery, figurative language, motif, and so on—most of the videos in this series employ close reading!

But how do you look at what the text says and how it says what it says?

I like to think of close reading as a process with two major steps, plus a bonus step if you’re using the process to write a paper.

The first step is to read and observe.  These observations would include the “specific textual evidence” the Common Core Standards mention—concrete things you can point to in the text.  Direct observations are pretty much the defining element that makes close reading close reading.

Usually, you read the text multiple times to make note of as many observations as possible.  And speaking of making notes, close reading usually involves some form of notetaking, which might be annotating in the margins or collecting observations in a notebook or computer file.

The second step is to interpret what you notice.  Look for patterns in your observations, and look for places where those patterns break.  Look for places in the text that snagged your attention, even if at first you don’t know why.  What implicit ideas are embedded in these patterns and anomalies?  What is significant about your observations, and what conclusions can you draw from them?

These questions are pretty broad, but you can ask yourself more specific questions based on the particular text you’re analyzing and on the general direction of your observations.

One thing I want to clarify is that steps one and two of this process aren’t necessarily sequential, as in, “I have completed my observations and I will now interpret them.”  It’s more likely that you’ll interpret as you observe, and continue to observe as you interpret.

If you’re using close reading to write a paper, the third bonus step is to corral your observations and interpretations into a cohesive argument.  This may involve cutting out the observations and interpretations that aren’t relevant, and going back to the text for additional observations you can interpret for the argument you’re developing.