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CloseReadingGuide

This guide outlines how to conduct a close reading of a passage, emphasizing the importance of analyzing language, structure, logic, and characterization. It encourages students to gather observations and organize their essays to present a unified argument about the passage's significance, supported by textual evidence. The final essay should interpret the chosen passage rather than merely paraphrase it, highlighting its importance within the larger work.

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Elizabeth Bergman
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5 views2 pages

CloseReadingGuide

This guide outlines how to conduct a close reading of a passage, emphasizing the importance of analyzing language, structure, logic, and characterization. It encourages students to gather observations and organize their essays to present a unified argument about the passage's significance, supported by textual evidence. The final essay should interpret the chosen passage rather than merely paraphrase it, highlighting its importance within the larger work.

Uploaded by

Elizabeth Bergman
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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HUM 216-217

Close Readings: A “How To” Guide

A “close reading” makes an argument about the meaning, significance, and/or effect
of a passage, supported by specific points about its language and content. The first
stage is to gather observations about the following aspects of the passage:

1. language and imagery. In addition to formal devices like simile and metaphor,
think about the specific associations of the various words, their level of diction
and what that tells you about the speaker or the work itself.
2. structure and rhetoric. How do the arrangement and patterning of the text
emphasize words and ideas and relate them to one another for comparison or
contrast? Features to consider include the position of words within marked
structural units—new paragraphs, sections, or poetic lines or stanzas—and
the effect of patterns of sound, like alliteration, assonance, and rhyme, and
poetic meter. If the passage comes from a speech, consider who addresses
whom, what they are trying to persuade them of, and how they go about it.
3. logic/argument. Does the passage itself make a logical argument? If so, how
do the ideas logically connect to one another? What sort of evidence does it
offer?
4. characterization. What does the passage contribute to your understanding of
the characters in the work, or of the author/narrator as s/he represents
her/himself?
5. Once you feel you have mastered this type of paper, you can also begin
incorporating connections inside and outside the text, while still keeping
your focus on your chosen passage. Thinking about similar passages within a
text can help support claims about the meaning of specific terms and ideas or
the symbolism of images. If you want to argue, for example, that water is
associated with death in a passage from the Iliad, finding a parallel image that
makes that association more explicitly will support your claim. Similarly, one
way to figure out what “fame” or “heroism” connotes in a particular work is to
find other points in the text where it is defined or discussed.

Your observations provide the raw material for a good close reading, but the paper
you submit should do more than string together your responses to such questions.
Please organize your essay to make a unified argument/point about the significance
of the passage. Remember, you are trying to explain not what it means, but how it
means it, or, put another way, you are trying to demonstrate, using textual evidence,
that the passage has the significance you claim it has. Sometimes essays can be
effectively organized by going through the passage in order, analyzing how its
meaning or effect develops; another option is to treat the topics suggested in
individual paragraphs or sections, or even to focus closely on a specific topic, for
example, the effect of a particular simile or the development of one idea. You don’t
need to include everything you observe. Some of your observations will naturally
relate to one another, and these connections will be the basis of your argument.
Your essay should clearly present your interpretation of your chosen passage. That
interpretation should be supported by the evidence you have gathered from your
close reading. A close reading should not be a paraphrase or summary. Nor should
it be an essay on a topic suggested by or relevant to the passage (fate in the Iliad, for
example). And while everyone will see different things in a passage, it should also
be more than a transcription of your response. Instead, ask yourself, and explain to
the reader, what in the passage evokes that response. Despite the fact that the aim of
this exercise is to make you concentrate on details, you may wish, in your
conclusion, to make clear why this passage is important within the work as a whole.

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