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How to do a close reading essay [Updated 2023]

Close reading refers to the process of interpreting a literary work’s meaning by analyzing both its form and content. In this post, we provide you with strategies for close reading that you can apply to your next assignment or analysis.

What is a close reading?

Close reading involves paying attention to a literary work’s language, style, and overall meaning. It includes looking for patterns, repetitions, oddities, and other significant features of a text. Your goal should be to reveal subtleties and complexities beyond an initial reading.

The primary difference between simply reading a work and doing a close reading is that, in the latter, you approach the text as a kind of detective.

When you’re doing a close reading, a literary work becomes a puzzle. And, as a reader, your job is to pull all the pieces together—both what the text says and how it says it.

How do you do a close reading?

Typically, a close reading focuses on a small passage or section of a literary work. Although you should always consider how the selection you’re analyzing fits into the work as a whole, it’s generally not necessary to include lengthy summaries or overviews in a close reading.

There are several aspects of the text to consider in a close reading:

• Literal Content: Even though a close reading should go beyond an analysis of a text’s literal content, every reading should start there. You need to have a firm grasp of the foundational content of a passage before you can analyze it closely. Use the common journalistic questions (Who? What? When? Where? Why?) to establish the basics like plot, character, and setting.
• Tone: What is the tone of the passage you’re examining? How does the tone influence the entire passage? Is it serious, comic, ironic, or something else?
• Characterization: What do you learn about specific characters from the passage? Who is the narrator or speaker? Watch out for language that reveals the motives and feelings of particular characters.
• Structure: What kind of structure does the work utilize? If it’s a poem, is it written in free or blank verse? If you’re working with a novel, does the structure deviate from certain conventions, like straightforward plot or realism? Does the form contribute to the overall meaning?
• Figurative Language: Examine the passage carefully for similes, metaphors, and other types of figurative language. Are there repetitions of certain figures or patterns of opposition? Do certain words or phrases stand in for larger issues?
• Diction: Diction means word choice. You should look up any words that you don’t know in a dictionary and pay attention to the meanings and etymology of words. Never assume that you know a word’s meaning at first glance. Why might the author choose certain words over others?
• Style and Sound: Pay attention to the work’s style. Does the text utilize parallelism? Are there any instances of alliteration or other types of poetic sound? How do these stylistic features contribute to the passage’s overall meaning?
• Context: Consider how the passage you’re reading fits into the work as a whole. Also, does the text refer to historical or cultural information from the world outside of the text? Does the text reference other literary works?

Once you’ve considered the above features of the passage, reflect on its relationship to the work’s larger themes, ideas, and actions. In the end, a close reading allows you to expand your understanding of a text.

Close reading example

Let’s take a look at how this technique works by examining two stanzas from Lorine Niedecker’s poem, “ I rose from marsh mud ”:

I rose from marsh mud, algae, equisetum, willows, sweet green, noisy birds and frogs to see her wed in the rich rich silence of the church, the little white slave-girl in her diamond fronds.

First, we need to consider the stanzas’ literal content. In this case, the poem is about attending a wedding. Next, we should take note of the poem’s form: four-line stanzas, written in free verse.

From there, we need to look more closely at individual words and phrases. For instance, the first stanza discusses how the speaker “rose from marsh mud” and then lists items like “algae, equisetum, willows” and “sweet green,” all of which are plants. Could the speaker have been gardening before attending the wedding?

Now, juxtapose the first stanza with the second: the speaker leaves the natural world of mud and greenness for the “rich/ rich silence of the church.” Note the repetition of the word, “rich,” and how the poem goes on to describe the “little white slave-girl/ in her diamond fronds,” the necessarily “rich” jewelry that the bride wears at her wedding.

Niedecker’s description of the diamond jewelry as “fronds” refers back to the natural world of plants that the speaker left behind. Note also the similarities in sound between the “frogs” of the first stanza and the “fronds” of the second.

We might conclude from a comparison of the two stanzas that, while the “marsh mud” might be full of “noisy/ birds and frogs,” it’s a far better place to be than the “rich/rich silence of the church.”

Ultimately, even a short close reading of Niedecker’s poem reveals layers of meaning that enhance our understanding of the work’s overall message.

How to write a close reading essay

Getting started.

Before you can write your close reading essay, you need to read the text that you plan to examine at least twice (but often more than that). Follow the above guidelines to break down your close reading into multiple parts.

Once you’ve read the text closely and made notes, you can then create a short outline for your essay. Determine how you want to approach to structure of your essay and keep in mind any specific requirements that your instructor may have for the assignment.

Structure and organization

Some close reading essays will simply analyze the text’s form and content without making a specific argument about the text. Other times, your instructor might want you to use a close reading to support an argument. In these cases, you’ll need to include a thesis statement in the introduction to your close reading essay.

You’ll organize your essay using the standard essay format. This includes an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Most of your close reading will be in the body paragraphs.

Formatting and length

The formatting of your close reading essay will depend on what type of citation style that your assignment requires. If you’re writing a close reading for a composition or literature class , you’ll most likely use MLA or Chicago style.

The length of your essay will vary depending on your assignment guidelines and the length and complexity of the text that you’re analyzing. If your close reading is part of a longer paper, then it may only take up a few paragraphs.

Citations and bibliography

Since you will be quoting directly from the text in your close reading essay, you will need to have in-text, parenthetical citations for each quote. You will also need to include a full bibliographic reference for the text you’re analyzing in a bibliography or works cited page.

To save time, use a credible citation generator like BibGuru to create your in-text and bibliographic citations. You can also use our citation guides on MLA and Chicago to determine what you need to include in your citations.

Frequently Asked Questions about how to do a close reading

A successful close reading pays attention to both the form and content of a literary work. This includes: literal content, tone, characterization, structure, figurative language, diction, sound, style, and context.

A close reading essay is a paper that analyzes a text or a portion of a text. It considers both the form and content of the text. The specific format of your close reading essay will depend on your assignment guidelines.

Skimming and close reading are opposite approaches. Skimming involves scanning a text superficially in order to glean the most important points, while close reading means analyzing the details of a text’s language, style, and overall form.

You might begin a close reading by providing some context about the passage’s significance to the work as a whole. You could also briefly summarize the literal content of the section that you’re examining.

The length of your essay will vary depending on your assignment guidelines and the length and complexity of the text that you’re analyzing.

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How to Do a Close Reading

Use the links below to jump directly to any section of this guide:

Close Reading Fundamentals

How to choose a passage to close-read, how to approach a close reading, how to annotate a passage, how to improve your close reading, how to practice close reading, how to incorporate close readings into an essay, how to teach close reading, additional resources for advanced students.

Close reading engages with the formal properties of a text—its literary devices, language, structure, and style. Popularized in the mid-twentieth century, this way of reading allows you to interpret a text without outside information such as historical context, author biography, philosophy, or political ideology. It also requires you to put aside your affective (that is, personal and emotional) response to the text, focusing instead on objective study. Why close-read a text? Doing so will increase your understanding of how a piece of writing works, as well as what it means. Perhaps most importantly, close reading can help you develop and support an essay argument. In this guide, you'll learn more about what close reading entails and find strategies for producing precise, creative close readings. We've included a section with resources for teachers, along with a final section with further reading for advanced students.

You might compare close reading to wringing out a wet towel, in which you twist the material repeatedly until you have extracted as much liquid as possible. When you close-read, you'll return to a short passage several times in order to note as many details about its form and content as possible. Use the links below to learn more about close reading's place in literary history and in the classroom.

"Close Reading" (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia's relatively short introduction to close reading contains sections on background, examples, and how to teach close reading. You can also click the links on this page to learn more about the literary critics who pioneered the method.

"Close Reading: A Brief Note" (Literariness.org)

This article provides a condensed discussion of what close reading is, how it works, and how it is different from other ways of reading a literary text.

"What Close Reading Actually Means" ( TeachThought )

In this article by an Ed.D., you'll learn what close reading "really means" in the classroom today—a meaning that has shifted significantly from its original place in 20th century literary criticism.

"Close Reading" (Univ. of Washington)

This hand-out from a college writing course defines close reading, suggests  why  we close-read, and offers tips for close reading successfully, including focusing on language, audience, and scope.

"Glossary Entry on New Criticism" (Poetry Foundation)

If you'd like to read a short introduction to the school of thought that gave rise to close reading, this is the place to go. Poetry Foundation's entry on New Criticism is concise and accessible.

"New Criticism" (Washington State Univ.)

This webpage from a college writing course offers another brief explanation of close reading in relation to New Criticism. It provides some key questions to help you think like a New Critic.

When choosing a passage to close-read, you'll want to look for relatively short bits of text that are rich in detail. The resources below offer more tips and tricks for selecting passages, along with links to pre-selected passages you can print for use at home or in the classroom.

"How to Choose the Perfect Passage for Close Reading" ( We Are Teachers )

This post from a former special education teacher describes six characteristics you might look for when selecting a close reading passage from a novel: beginnings, pivotal plot points, character changes, high-density passages, "Q&A" passages, and "aesthetic" passages. 

"Close Reading Passages" (Reading Sage)

Reading Sage provides links to close reading passages you can use as is; alternatively, you could also use them as models for selecting your own passages. The page is divided into sections geared toward elementary, middle school, and early high school students.

"Close Reading" (Univ. of Guelph)

The University of Guelph's guide to close reading contains a short section on how to "Select a Passage." The author suggests that you choose a brief passage. 

"Close Reading Advice" (Prezi)

This Prezi was created by an AP English teacher. The opening section on passage selection suggests choosing "thick paragraphs" filled with "figurative language and rich details or description."

Now that you know how to select a passage to analyze, you'll need to familiarize yourself with the textual qualities you should look for when reading. Whether you're approaching a poem, a novel, or a magazine article, details on the level of language (literary devices) and form (formal features) convey meaning. Understanding  how  a text communicates will help you understand  what  it is communicating. The links in this section will familiarize you with the tools you need to start a close reading.

Literary Devices

"Literary Devices and Terms" (LitCharts)

LitCharts' dedicated page covers 130+ literary devices. Also known as "rhetorical devices," "figures of speech," or "elements of style," these linguistic constructions are the building blocks of literature. Some of the most common include  simile , metaphor , alliteration , and onomatopoeia ; browse the links on LitCharts to learn about many more. 

"Rhetorical Device" (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia's page on rhetorical devices defines the term in relation to the ancient art of "rhetoric" or persuasive speaking. At the bottom of the page, you'll find links to several online handbooks and lists of rhetorical devices.

"15 Must Know Rhetorical Terms for AP English Literature" ( Albert )

The  Albert blog   offers this list of 15 rhetorical devices that high school English students should know how to define and spot in a literary text; though geared toward the Advanced Placement exam, its tips are widely applicable.

"The 55 AP Language and Composition Terms You Must Know" (PrepScholar)

This blog post lists 55 terms high school students should learn how to recognize and define for the Advanced Placement exam in English Literature.

Formal Features

In LitCharts' bank of literary devices and terms, you'll also find resources to describe a text's structure and overall character. Some of the most important of these are  rhyme , meter , and  tone ; browse the page to find more. 

"Rhythm" ( Encyclopedia Britannica )

This encyclopedia entry on rhythm and meter offers an in-depth definition of the two most fundamental aspects of poetry.

"How to Analyze Syntax for AP English Literature" ( Albert)

The Albert blog will help you understand what "syntax" is, making a case for why you should pay attention to sentence structure when analyzing a literary text.

"Grammar Basics: Sentence Parts and Sentence Structures" ( ThoughtCo )

This article provides a meticulous overview of the components of a sentence. It's useful if you need to review your parts of speech or if you need to be able to identify things like prepositional phrases.

"Style, Diction, Tone, and Voice" (Wheaton College)

Wheaton College's Writing Center offers this clear, concise discussion of several important formal features. Although it's designed to help essay writers, it will also help you understand and spot these stylistic features in others' work. 

Now that you know what rhetorical devices, formal features, and other details to look for, you're ready to find them in a text. For this purpose, it is crucial to annotate (write notes) as you read and re-read. Each time you return to the text, you'll likely notice something new; these observations will form the basis of your close reading. The resources in this section offer some concrete strategies for annotating literary texts.

"How to Annotate a Text" (LitCharts)

Begin by consulting our  How to Annotate a Text  guide. This collection of links and resources is helpful for short passages (that is, those for close reading) as well as longer works, like whole novels or poems.

"Annotation Guide" (Covington Catholic High School)

This hand-out from a high school teacher will help you understand why we annotate, and how to annotate a text successfully. You might choose to incorporate some of the interpretive notes and symbols suggested here.

"Annotating Literature" (New Canaan Public Schools)

This one-page, introductory resource provides a list of 10 items you should look for when reading a text, including attitude and theme.

"Purposeful Annotation" (Dave Stuart Jr.)

This article from a high school teacher's blog describes the author's top close reading strategy: purposeful annotation. In fact, this teacher more or less equates close reading with annotation.

Looking for ways to improve your close reading? The articles, guides, and videos in this section will expose you to various methods of close reading, as well as practice exercises. No two people read exactly the same way. Whatever your level of expertise, it can be useful to broaden your skill set by testing the techniques suggested by the resources below.

"How to Do a Close Reading" (Harvard College Writing Center)

This article, part of Harvard's comprehensive "Strategies for Essay Writing Guide," describes three steps to a successful close reading. You will want to return to this resource when incorporating your close reading into an essay.

"A Short Guide to Close Reading for Literary Analysis" (Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison Writing Center)

Working through this guide from another college writing center will help you move through the process of close reading a text. You'll find a sample analysis of Robert Frost's "Design" at the end.

"How to Do a Close Reading of a Text" (YouTube)

This four-minute video from the "Literacy and Math Ideas" channel offers a number of helpful tips for reading a text closely in accordance with Common Core standards.

"Poetry: Close Reading" (Purdue OWL)

Short, dense poems are a natural fit for the close reading approach. This page from the Purdue Online Writing Lab takes you step-by-step through an analysis of Shakespeare's Sonnet 116.

"Steps for Close Reading or Explication de Texte" ( The Literary Link )

This page, which mentions close reading's close relationship to the French formalist method of  "explication de texte," shares "12 Steps to Literary Awareness."

You can practice your close reading skills by reading, re-reading and annotating any brief passage of text. The resources below will get you started by offering pre-selected passages and questions to guide your reading. You'll find links to resources that are designed for students of all levels, from elementary school through college.

"Notes on Close Reading" (MIT Open Courseware)

This resource describes steps you can work through when close reading, providing a passage from Mary Shelley's  Frankenstein  for you to test your skills.

"Close Reading Practice Worksheets" (Gillian Duff's English Resources)

Here, you'll find 10 close reading-centered worksheets you can download and print. The "higher-close-reading-formula" link at the bottom of the page provides a chart with even more steps and strategies for close reading.

"Close Reading Activities" (Education World)

The four activities described on this page are best suited to elementary and middle school students. Under each heading is a link to handouts or detailed descriptions of the activity.

"Close Reading Practice Passages: High School" (Varsity Tutors)

This webpage from Varsity Tutors contains over a dozen links to close reading passages and exercises, including several resources that focus on close-reading satire.

"Benjamin Franklin's Satire of Witch Hunting" (America in Class)

This page contains both a "teacher's guide" and "student version" to interpreting Benjamin Franklin's satire of a witch trial. The thirteen close reading questions on the right side of the page will help you analyze the text thoroughly.

Whether you're writing a research paper or an essay, close reading can help you build an argument. Careful analysis of your primary texts allows you to draw out meanings you want to emphasize, thereby supporting your central claim. The resources in this section introduce you to strategies suited to various common writing assignments.

"How to Write a Research Paper" (LitCharts)

The resources in this guide will help you learn to formulate a thesis, organize evidence, write an outline, and draft a research paper, one of the two most common assignments in which you might incorporate close reading.

"How to Write an Essay" (LitCharts)

In this guide, you'll learn how to plan, draft, and revise an essay, whether for the classroom or as a take-home assignment. Close reading goes hand in hand with the brainstorming and drafting processes for essay writing.

"Guide to the Close Reading Essay" (Univ. of Warwick)

This guide was designed for undergraduates, and assumes prior knowledge of formal features and rhetorical devices one might find in a poem. High schoolers will find it useful after addressing the "elements of a close reading" section above.

"Beginning the Academic Essay" (Harvard College Writing Center)

Harvard's guide discusses the broader category of the "academic essay." Here, the author assumes that your essay's close readings will be accompanied by context and evidence from secondary sources. 

A Short Guide to Writing About Literature (Amazon)

Sylvan Barnet and William E. Cain emphasize that writing is a process. In their book, you'll find definitions of important literary terms, examples of successful explications of literary texts, and checklists for essay writers.

Due in part to the Common Core's emphasis on close reading skills, resources for teaching students how to close-read abound. Here, you'll find a wealth of information on how and why we teach students to close-read texts. The first section includes links to activities, exercises, and complete lesson plans. The second section offers background material on the method, along with strategies for implementing close reading in the classroom.

Lesson Plans and Activities

"Four Lessons for Introducing the Fundamental Steps of Close Reading" (Corwin)

Here, Corwin has made the second chapter of Nancy Akhavan's  The Nonfiction Now Lesson Bank, Grades 4 – 8 available online. You'll find four sample lessons to use in the elementary or middle school classroom

"Sonic Patterns: Exploring Poetic Techniques Through Close Reading" ( ReadWriteThink )

This lesson plan for high school students includes material for five 50-minute sessions on sonic patterns (including consonance, assonance, and alliteration). The literary text at hand is Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays."

"Close Reading of a Short Text: Complete Lesson" (McGraw Hill via YouTube)

This eight-minute video describes a complete lesson in which a teacher models close reading of a short text and offers guiding questions.

"Close Reading Model Lessons" (Achieve the Core)

These three model lessons on close reading will help you determine what makes a text "appropriately complex" for the grade level you teach.

Close Reading Bundle (Teachers Pay Teachers)

This top-rated bundle of close reading resources was designed for the middle school classroom. It contains over 150 pages of worksheets, complete lesson plans, and literacy center ideas.

"10 Intriguing Photos to Teach Close Reading and Visual Thinking Skills" ( The New York Times )

The New York Times' s Learning Network has gathered 10 photos from the "What's Going on in This Picture" series that teachers can use to help students develop analytical and visual thinking skills.

"The Close Reading Essay" (Brandeis Univ.)

Brandeis University's writing program offers this detailed set of guidelines and goals you might use when assigning a close reading essay.

Close Reading Resources (Varsity Tutors)

Varsity Tutors has compiled a list of over twenty links to lesson plans, strategies, and activities for teaching elementary, middle school, and high school students to close read.

Background Material and Teaching Strategies

Falling in Love with Close Reading (Amazon)

Christopher Lehman and Kate Roberts aim to show how close reading can be "rigorous, meaningful, and joyous." It offers a three-step "close reading ritual" and engaging lesson plans.

Notice & Note: Strategies for Close Reading (Amazon)

Kylene Beers (a former Senior Reading Researcher at Yale) and Robert E. Probst (a Professor Emeritus of English Education) introduce six "signposts" readers can use to detect significant moments in a work of literature.

"How to Do a Close Reading" (YouTube)

TeachLikeThis offers this four-minute video on teaching students to close-read by looking at a text's language, narrative, syntax, and context.

"Strategy Guide: Close Reading of a Literary Text" ( ReadWriteThink )

This guide for middle school and high school teachers will help you choose texts that are appropriately complex for the grade level you teach, and offers strategies for planning engaging lessons.

"Close Reading Steps for Success" (Appletastic Learning)

Shelly Rees, a teacher with over 20 years of experience, introduces six helpful steps you can use to help your students engage with challenging reading passages. The article is geared toward elementary and middle school teachers.

"4 Steps to Boost Students' Close Reading Skills" ( Amplify )

Doug Fisher, a professor of educational leadership, suggests using these four steps to help students at any grade level learn how to close read. 

Like most tools of literary analysis, close reading has a complex history. It's not necessary to understand the theoretical underpinnings of close reading in order to use this tool. For advanced high school students and college students who ask "why close-read," though, the resources below will serve as useful starting points for discussion.

"Discipline and Parse: The Politics of Close Reading" ( Los Angeles Review of Books )

This book review by a well-known English professor at Columbia provides an engaging, anecdotal introduction to close reading's place in literary history. Robbins points to some of the method's shortcomings, but also elegantly defends it.

"Intentional Fallacy" ( Encyclopedia Britannica )

The literary critics who developed close reading cautioned against judging a text based on the author's intention. This encyclopedia entry offers an expanded definition of this way of reading, called the "intentional fallacy."

"Seven Types of Ambiguity" (Wikipedia)

This Wikipedia article will introduce you to William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity  (1930), one of the foundational texts of New Criticism, the school of thought that theorized close reading.

"What is Distant Reading" ( The New York Times)

This article makes it clear that "close reading" isn't the only way to analyze literary texts. It offers a brief introduction to the "distant reading" method of computational criticism pioneered by Franco Moretti in recent years.

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• Apr 9, 2023

Close-Reading Strategies: The Ultimate Guide to Close Reading

Close reading helps you not only read a text, but analyze it. The process of close reading teaches you to approach a text actively, considering the text’s purpose, how the author chose to present it, and how these decisions impact the text.

The close reading strategy improves your reading comprehension, your analysis, and your writing. Close reading will help you write essays and perform well on standardized tests like the SAT Reading Section . Any age group can practice close reading, and it works with any text.

This article will outline everything you need to know about close reading, including what it is, why it's important, how to do a close reading, and 5 strategies to improve your close reading abilities.

What is close reading?

Close reading is a reading method that examines not only the text’s content but how the author’s rhetorical, literary, and structural decisions help develop it to achieve a purpose.

No matter the text genre–narrative, informational, argumentative, poetry, or editorial–the author uses language to achieve some purpose: to inform, convince, entertain the audience, or a combination. In every text, the author utilizes a variety of rhetorical and literary strategies, or devices, to achieve these effects on the audience.

Common literary strategies or devices that impact every text:

Diction: Word choice

Syntax: Sentence structure

Tone: Emotion of the words used

Conflict: Problems, issues, or disagreements within or related to the text

Structure: The order of the words, sentences, paragraphs, and ideas

Point of view: The speaker’s perspective on the events or subject matter

Genre: The category or “type” of text–fiction, science-fiction, scientific article, etc.

Imagery: The sensory or visual language the author uses to describe the subject, characters, setting, etc.

Close reading observes how the author uses these strategies to develop the text, create an intended effect upon the reader, and build a central message or main idea.

Why is close reading important?

Close reading is important because it helps you comprehend the text, develop deeper ideas about its meaning, and write and talk about the text with more sophistication. When you consider not just what the text says, but how and why the author constructs it that way, you move beyond surface-level reading into analysis.

Close reading allows you to notice details, language, and connections that you may have previously overlooked. These observations create insights about the text, leading to richer class discussions, better essays, and more joy while reading. Observing an author’s strategies also improves your writing, as you gradually begin to emulate the strategies you notice.

How do you do a close reading?

Do a close reading by selecting a text passage, closely observing the writing style and structure while you read, noticing the author's language choices, underlining and annotating your observations, and asking questions about the text.

General Close-Reading Process:

Select a text passage: Pick a piece of text or passage that you want to analyze. The sweet spot usually lies between roughly one and three paragraphs. Songs and poems also work well for close reading.

Notice the writing style: As you read, ask yourself “What stands out to me about this author’s style? What patterns, words, and choices do I notice?” Pay attention to the emotions you feel as you read, identifying what in the text triggers that response.

Observe the structure: Notice how the author orders words, sentences, lines, and paragraphs. Consider how this order builds an image or idea about the text’s subject. Ask yourself, “How does this structure develop my understanding of the subject?”

Notice language choices: The author selected particular words to build a tone, evoke images in the reader’s mind, create a nuanced argument, or have some other effect on the reader. Note powerful or significant diction–word choice–and consider the purpose it serves, or how it develops any of the devices listed above, such as tone or imagery.

Underline: Have a pencil while you read and–if you’re allowed to mark the paper–underline any observations you make. Underline any of the devices listed above, anything that has an effect on you, or anything you enjoy. There’s no right or wrong way to underline a text, so underline whatever catches your interest.

Annotate: Record your thoughts and observations as you read, by writing in the margins, on a separate sheet of paper, or using an assigned annotation format. Feel free to note questions, individual words, literary devices, or anything you notice.

Ask questions: Along with the annotation ideas listed above, formulate questions and write them down while you read. Generally, the best questions begin with how or why . For example, “Why did the author use this word?” or “How does this detail affect the reader?”

5 Close Reading Strategies to Improve Analysis and Comprehension

Here are my 5 favorite strategies to improve your close reading, analysis, and reading comprehension:

Generate a purpose question (PQ)

Annotate with your PQ in mind

Track the 5 Ws

Notice the conflict

Identify the tone

Generate a Purpose Question

A purpose question (PQ) is a question you pose before reading a text to help you read actively. You can create a PQ for a text of any genre or length–a novel, a short story, a poem, a passage, or an informational text–and there is no right or wrong way to create a PQ.

To create a purpose question, consider any pre-reading context you have:

Text images

School assignment guidelines

Any task you’re expected to complete when you finish reading

Examine the text’s title to guess what the text is about, then formulate an open-ended question that relates to the text, what it might say, and what might be important. As you read, seek and underline information that relates to your PQ and helps you answer it. By the time you finish reading, you should be able to answer your PQ.

Generally, the best open-ended questions begin with how or why .

Your PQ will sometimes simply repurpose the text’s title into a question, like these examples:

Text TitleExample PQ “A Good Man is Hard to Find?” (fiction)Why is a good man hard to find?“The Lady with the Dog” (fiction)What is so important about the lady and her dog?“The Fringe Benefits of Failure” (essay)How can failure be beneficial?“An Epidemic of Fear” (essay)What is causing the epidemic of fear?“New Therapies to Aid Muscle Regeneration” (article)How do these new therapies aid muscle regeneration?

Write down your PQ, either on the text itself or on a separate sheet of paper for note-taking. When you read with a purpose–like answering a question–it becomes easier to identify and annotate what’s important in the text.

Annotate with your PQ in Mind

It’s much easier to take good notes when you have a reading goal–something to answer or accomplish, such as a PQ.

As you read and annotate the text, refer to your purpose question. Search the text for details that relate to and help you answer your PQ. When you find relevant details, underline them and record how the detail relates to your PQ. If you can’t write on the text itself, record your thoughts on a separate paper or word document.

Here’s how and where I annotate a text, and what I usually write in my annotations.

Where and How to Annotate a TextWhat to Write Underline the text Questions –what did you ask or wonder while reading?Write in the margin Thoughts and connections –what did the text make you think about?Use a separate sheet of paper Comments –what made you underline that particular word or detail?On your phone or computer–use a notetaking app or a Google Doc Significance –why is that particular detail important?

As you read the text, constantly ask yourself, How does this information help me answer my PQ? When you’re finished with the text, you should be able to answer your purpose question–and the notes you’ve taken should help you do that.

To monitor your own comprehension while you read, remain aware of the text’s 5 Ws: who, what, where, when, why.

After every sentence or section, reflect to verify the following information:

Who: Who is the text about? Who is narrating, or telling the story?

What: What is the text about?

Where: Where do the text’s events take place?

When: When did the text’s events occur?

Why: Why did this main event occur? Why did the storyteller write this text?

At any given point while you read, you should be able to identify this context. If you realize that you’re disoriented and have lost track of some key Ws, revisit the most recent sentences to see if you missed something critical. Then, continue on with the text, mindfully searching for the information you’re missing.

If you finish reading and still feel uncertain about this core information, revisit the first paragraph. A passage’s first paragraph usually provides fundamental details–such as the characters, setting, main event, and the story’s general context. Revisiting this paragraph sometimes alerts you to basic details you overlooked during your first readthrough.

The 5 Ws also work as an annotation strategy, where you underline all textual information related to the 5 Ws.

Notice the Conflict

Every story or passage centers around at least one conflict. A conflict is the characters’ primary struggle–the issue they’re faced with, the main challenge they try to overcome.

Keep in mind that a conflict can be external or internal. An external conflict takes place outside the character in the physical world–such as a fistfight, an argument with a friend, or committing a bank robbery. An internal conflict takes place inside the narrator–such as struggling to get over a girlfriend, becoming jealous of a friend, or worrying about how peers will perceive a behavior.

As you read, ask yourself “What is the character’s primary issue or challenge?” While there may be more than one, try to identify the most central, prominent conflict. By identifying a story’s conflict, you can observe and annotate how the author emphasizes it through storytelling elements–character development, tone, word choice, and structure. Underline these elements and write a few words describing how they build or relate to the central conflict.

Identify the Tone

A text’s tone is the speaker’s attitude toward the subject matter–actions, characters, or events in the text. Every piece of writing has multiple tones, which develop and change throughout the text according to the writer’s word choice.

Describe the tone using adjectives :

To Kill a Mockingbird began with a lighthearted tone and progressed to a dark , tense tone as the plot continued.

The article about bees used an informative , professional tone.

My writing always has an informal tone, even when I want it to be academic .

Hermann Hesse ends Siddhartha with a serene and beautiful tone.

Each sentence carries a unique tone, causing a story’s tone to change subtly every few lines. As you read, notice how the tone develops as the story continues. Underline the words and phrases that most powerfully create the tone, describing the tone in the margin. If you notice a sudden shift in tone, underline the point where it changed and write a few words about how it changed.

Close Reading Strategies Make You a Better Reader

Close reading is more than just a classroom assignment–it’s a reading method that helps you analyze and comprehend all texts. It will help you in class, on your own, and on standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT Reading Sections .

While you may initially practice close reading by underlining and writing notes in the margin, over time it will influence the way you approach all texts: You will find yourself prereading a text, considering the title, generating a purpose question, tracking the 5 Ws while you read, asking questions, observing the text’s conflict, and noticing the tone.

Close reading helps you comprehend difficult texts, and it helps you write essays for class. It’s an all-purpose writing strategy.

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How to Write a Close Reading Essay: Full Guide with Examples

writing Close Reading Essay

There is no doubt that close-reading essays are on the rise these days. And for a good reason — it is a powerful technique that can help you make your mark as a student and showcase your understanding of the text.

In this type of writing, readers will read the literary text carefully and interpret it from various points of view. Read on.

What is a close Reading Essay?

A close-reading essay is an in-depth analysis of a literary work. It can be used to support a thesis statement or as a research paper. A close-reading essay focuses on the tiny themes inherent in a literary passage, story, or poem.

The focus of this type of essay is on critical thinking and analysis. The author will look at the small details that make up the overall meaning of a text.

The author will also consider how these tiny themes relate to each other and how they are presented within the text.

The key areas where a close reading essay focuses include:

• Motivation and setting – This includes why the author wrote the piece and their purpose when they chose to write it. You can explore this through character analysis as well as themes that are common across multiple works.
• Characters:  While characters may or may not have any significance in an overall plot, they can make up many of the elements discussed in this essay. For example, if you were analyzing Hamlet, then you would want to look at how Hamlet’s character affects his motivation for suicide (which is directly related to his madness) and how it relates to his relationship with Ophelia.

How to Write a Close Reading Essay -Step-By-Step Guide

1. read the selected text at least three additional times.

Analyze the text using your critical thinking skills. What are the author’s main points and purposes? How does the author develop these points? What evidence does he or she use to support these points? How do other writers in the field of the study compare with this author’s views?

Compare and contrast this author’s point of view with other writers in your field of study. What is their purpose in writing? What evidence do they use to support their positions?

How do they compare with this writer’s views?

2. Underline Portions of the Text that you Find Significant or Odd

The purpose of this section is to give the reader a sense of the author’s tone and approach to the subject.

A close-reading essay should be read at least twice, preferably three times. Underline or highlight any portions of the text that you find odd or significant.

Ask yourself: What does this mean? How does this affect my view of the work? What questions do I have now that I didn’t have before?

Take notes on what you think might be important. You may want to write down your questions and observations as they occur to you while reading your essay. Make sure they are hierarchical so they can easily guide your next step in writing about them.

3. State the Conclusions for the Paper

A close-reading essay analyzes a text and the author’s meaning. The key to this type of essay is the ability to conclude a text. It requires the student to think critically about what he/she has read and how it relates to other texts.

The most important aspect of writing a close-reading essay is being able to conclude after reading through a piece of work and analyzing it. The reader should always be able to answer questions like:

• What does this author mean?
• How can I apply this message to my life?
• Is this message relevant in today’s society?

4. Write your Introduction

The purpose of your paper is usually stated in the introduction somewhere (it might be buried in an abstract).

In other words, it’s not enough just to tell readers what they need to know; they also need some motivation to read further if they don’t know why they should read.

5. Write your Body Paragraphs.

A body paragraph is the bulk of your essay. It’s the place where you flesh out your ideas and connect them to the overall topic.

It’s easy to get bogged down in the details when writing a close-reading essay, so it’s important to stay focused on the big picture of what you’re trying to say. Here are some tips for developing your body paragraphs:

• Start with a thesis statement: Make sure that each paragraph starts with an idea or question that relates to the main point of your thesis statement. For example, suppose you’re writing about how human beings have been impacted by technology in society; then, in your first paragraph. In that case, you might want to talk about how computers are changing our lives and what this means for us as individuals and as a culture.
• Link ideas together:  Be sure that each paragraph is directly related to the previous one (or else your readers will lose track). Use transition words like “however,” “however,” “in contrast,” and “on the other hand,” or even simply add supporting details from different sources throughout each paragraph.

6. Write your Conclusion

When writing conclusion to your close reading essay, you’ll make a few points about why you think the book is worth reading. You should focus on whether or not the author has succeeded in his or her main objective and whether or not it’s an interesting book.

You should also consider how the author has achieved these goals. Did they succeed because of their writing style? Or did they use an effective structure? Did they make some unique observations that you hadn’t thought of before?

Do you have any specific questions about what was done well in the book? If so, ask them now so that you don’t forget to ask them when it’s time for your argumentative essay!

3 Close Reading Essay Examples

Below are three close-reading essay examples on the topic of “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The first example is from a student named Brandon:

The main character, Jay Gatsby, is one of the most interesting characters in literature that I have ever read about.

He was a millionaire who married into a family of lower-class people and became friends with their daughter Daisy Buchanan, who had recently graduated from college and moved to New York City, where she met his son Nick Carraway.

Jay Gatsby was so fascinating to me because he had a lot of passion for life; he never gave up on what he wanted, even though he had nothing to back it up.

When I read this book, I learned that some people don’t care about what happens to them or what other people think about them; they just do their own thing and don’t let anything stand in their way of achieving their goals in life (Gatsby).

When I read this book, I also learned about love and hate because there were many different sides to each character’s personality throughout the book (Gatsby).

In conclusion, “The Great Gatsby” is an interesting book.

Example Two

The main character in the novel, Adam Bede, is a strong-willed country boy who looks down upon city folk. He has no interest in being educated and feels that he would rather work on a farm than attend school.

He does not seem to have any particular talent or skill that would make him stand out. However, it is not until he meets the wealthy Miss Lavendar that he can express his talents through writing poetry and music.

The first time Adam meets Miss Lavendar, she sits at a piano playing a piece by Mozart. Adam has never heard music like this before. It is so beautiful that he immediately falls in love with her. The two become friends and eventually marry each other.

However, when Adam becomes famous for his poems about Miss Lavendar, she begins to feel threatened by her new husband’s success. She leaves him for another man named Mr. Thornton. He has money and power but no talent for writing poetry or music like Adam.

 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams

The play tells the story of a family during the Great Depression in Mississippi. Brick Pollitt has just returned home from World War I where he has been injured in battle and subsequently discharged with a disability pension.

His wife Maggie is expecting their first child, while his son Paul lives in New Orleans where he works as a pianist for a white man named Big Daddy Pollitt who owns a brothel in which Paul performs sexually explicit acts for the patrons at Big Daddy’s establishment called “The Brick House.”

With over 10 years in academia and academic assistance, Alicia Smart is the epitome of excellence in the writing industry. She is our chief editor and in charge of the writing department at Grade Bees.

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Write a Close Reading

What is close reading, what are different close reading assignments, what are the parts of a close reading, resources to help with writing your essay.

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Close reading is a way of carefully analyzing a short passage or poem in order to explain how language and organization is used and/or how an author builds an argument, elicits a response from the reader, and/or creates a particular mood. Attention to specific details allows you to assess and discuss the larger themes or concerns of the text as a whole.

An effective close reading discusses HOW the selected passage communicates meaning (what poetic or rhetorical strategies are used) as well as addresses WHY these strategies are used in this particular way. For example, what is the author trying to communicate to the reader? What decisions has the author made about word choice, tone, etc.?

There are two common kinds of close readings— English literature and Philosophy. However, close reading is a useful technique in any kind of analytical writing and these strategies can be applied to other disciplines.

Close reading can also be a good place to begin if you are having difficulty formulating an argument for a longer paper. Even if the assignment does not explicitly ask you to conduct a close reading, the strategies described above can be useful tools for more involved textual analysis. Keep in mind that longer papers may require close readings of more than one passage of a text; the connections between these close readings often form the basis of a more complicated argument.

The parts of the close reading will depend on the type of assignment. You might be asked to do something like the following:

• Write a formal essay with an introduction, body, and conclusion that closely examines elements from a text or passage and explains their importance or effect.
• Write a paragraph or series of paragraphs examining a passage or excerpt, explaining how it produces effects on the reader and how it contributes to the meaning of the larger text as a whole.
• Write an explication that traces a poem’s development from beginning to end, explaining how it creates certain effects on the reader or develops arguments and themes.

Words associated with a close reading include explication, exegesis, and analysis.

In most close reading assignments, you will want to include these elements:

An introduction or introductory sentence

• Identify the passage and its context (if it is an excerpt, tell us where it fits in the overall text).
• Tell us why it’s important to analyze this particular passage or text (why should we care?).
• For example, “George Eliot’s use of diction and narrative perspective in this passage of Middlemarch complicates the conventional understanding of gender and gender relations by refusing to adhere to a strict separation of gendered traits.”

A clearly stated argument

State your argument about the passage clearly and concisely. Although the length and style of a close reading that focuses on an excerpt may differ from an essay that focuses on a literary work in its entirety, your assignment should still have a clear argumentative thesis.

Your explanation of how you see the text creating effects or making arguments

When you are choosing your evidence, consider the tone of the passage and the specific words used to describe a character or event. Some authors create characters whose views significantly differ from their own. Some literary works feature narrators who are unreliable. When analyzing a passage, consider not only WHAT is said, but HOW it is said:

• No: “The author uses a variety of diction about men’s and women’s positions in society.” 
• Yes: “The author’s use of diction allows her to highlight how gender is associated with specific social and economic positions.”

Specific examples highlighted from the text

Focus in on words, phrases, and short passages that illustrate how you see the text creating its effects and meaning. For example, “Eliot uses the words ‘nature’ and ‘greatness’ in relation to men, suggesting that they are inherently more intelligent, powerful, and capable than women--or are at least considered to be so in the social context of the story."

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Elaine Showalter describes close reading as:

...slow reading, a deliberate attempt to detach ourselves from the magical power of story-telling and pay attention to language, imagery, allusion, intertextuality, syntax and form.

It is, in her words, ‘a form of defamiliarisation we use in order to break through our habitual and casual reading practices’ (Teaching Literature, 98).

As readers, we are accustomed to reading for plot, or allowing the joy of the reading experience to take over and carry us along, without stopping to ask how and why a particular passage, sentence, or word achieves its effects.

Close reading, then, is about pausing, and looking at the precise techniques, dynamics, and content of the text. It’s not reading between the lines, but reading further and further into the lines and seeing the multiple meanings a turn of phrase, a description, or a word can unlock.

It is possible to close read an extended passage, but for essays it is often a good technique to do the close reading first and then to use very short extracts or even single words to demonstrate your insights. So instead of doing a close reading of twenty lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream *in* your essay, you would do it independently, and then cite and explain three key phrases, relating them clearly to your developing argument. 

Close reading is also sometimes known as Practical Criticism, rooted in the techniques espoused by the Cambridge critic I. A. Richards.

He felt it was essential that students put aside their preconceptions and learn to appreciate the liveliness and multiplicity of language.

With that in mind, he gave students poems without any information about who wrote them or why they were written.

In the hands of subsequent critics, like William Empson, the technique became a way to offer virtuoso accounts of particular poems and literary works, with an emphasis on ambiguity and the multiplication of possible meanings.

In essence, close reading means taking a step back from the larger narrative and examining the constituent parts of a text.

Think of close reading as something that you do with a pencil and book in your hand. Mark up the pages; fill the margins.

“Annotate to appreciate; annotate to understand… It builds reading confidence; it helps us understand how literature is made—because it puts us there among the phrases.” Sometimes the Best Way to Read is to Mark up the Book - on the revelatory power of annotations

And then transcribe the poem, the passage, the quotation.

Accurate transcription of quotations is, for some, the first and last rule of close reading. If your passage isn’t transcribed meticulously, down to the last comma and (with poetry) spacing on the page, you can’t read it closely.

Careful transcription will also help you get inside a passage: you’ll get a feel for its rhythms, its twists and turns, its breathing. Look at the words.

Don’t take your eyes off the words. Work from the actual text in front of you, not from a sort of mental paraphrase of what the text says. As you do so, remember to think carefully about sound, not only when reading poetry but also when analysing prose.

Read the passage aloud, paying close attention to the rhythms of sentences. You might be surprised by what you hear: the eye can often glide over aspects of a text that the ear is keen to pick up. Remember, too, that it’s important not only to detect certain features but also to consider their effects. If you need to pause to catch your breath in the middle of a sentence, ask yourself why. How are form and content working together?

Close, not closed readings

Close reading has been criticised for being divorced from context and for pulling away from the historical and political engagements of the literary text.

Partly for that reason, it is important to think about the purpose behind your close reading – we are looking for close readings, not closed readings. Essentially, the close reading is the starting point for your essay, letting you find what is interesting, intricate, and unexpected about a literary text.

In the essay itself, you need to stitch that revelation about the complexities and ambiguities of particular terms, phrases and passages into a larger argument or context – don’t simply list everything you have found; craft it into an argument, and be prepared to downplay or leave out some of the elements you have spotted if they don’t relate to the larger picture.

For this reason, you might want to follow the “Rule of 2”. Your analysis of your quotation should be twice as long as the quotation itself. It's a nice reminder that we always need to go back and explain the textual evidence that's being cited.

Each piece of textual evidence needs and deserves detailed analysis if it's being used to support the argument's claims. It also helps to remind us to vary the lengths of quoted textual evidence so that an essay doesn't end up with only very brief quotations or long block quotations, but includes a mixture of different lengths that will best suit the claim being developed at any given point in the argument.

Some questions you may like to ask

• Who is speaking? Who is being spoken to? What is the reader assumed to know/not know? (University essays aren't written for an interested aunt or friend on a different course, but for an audience familiar with the themes and readings under discussion. Students are writing for an audience of engaged and interested peers. This means that the writer can assume that their reader knows the text and doesn't need extensive plot summary in the introduction or start of the essay. This frees up space for analysis and the laying out of each section's claims. It also helps to develop an authoritative voice: you are an expert speaking to other experts.)
• What is the point of the details included in the passage (eg if mundane things are mentioned, why is that; if there are elements of description that don’t seem to contribute to the plot what do they do instead)? 
• What generic clues are here (what kinds of writing are hinted at)? 
• Are there words or phrases which are ambiguous (could mean more than one thing)? If so, are we directed to privilege one reading over the other or do we keep both in play? Does one meaning open up an alternative story/history/narrative? What are the connotations of the words that are chosen? Do any of them open up new or different contexts? 
• Are there patterns which emerge in the language (the repetition of words or of certain kinds of words? Repeated phrases? Rhymes or half-rhymes? Metrical patterns?). What effects do they create? 
• Is there any movement in the passage you are reading? Are there any shapes or dominant metaphors? 
• What kind of rhythm does the passage have? What is its cadence?
• Is there anything that troubles you about the passage or that you’re not sure you fully understand? 
• Have you been to the dictionary (remember the full Oxford English Dictionary is available online through the library)?

For more specific advice, you might want to read our Ways of Reading series

• Ways of Reading a Novel
• Ways of Reading a Poem
• Ways of Reading a Film
• Ways of Reading a Play
• Ways of Reading a Translation

Extra Reading (and remember you can close read secondary as well as primary texts)

Thomas A. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor: a Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines (Harper, 2003). Elizabeth A. Howe, Close Reading: an Introduction to Literature (Prentice Hall, 2009). George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: a Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago, 1989). Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois (eds), Close Reading: the Reader (Duke, 2002). Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry (Oxford, 1995). Elaine Showalter, Teaching Literature (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002).

For more on Practical Criticism, with some useful online exercises, try the Virtual Classroom on Practical Criticism

There’s a neat example by Patricia Kain at Harvard College’s Writing Center .

Trev Broughton , Alexandra Kingston-Reese , Chloe Wigston-Smith , Hannah Roche , Helen Smith , and Matthew Townend April 2018

This article is available to download for free as a PDF for use as a personal learning tool or for use in the classroom as a teaching resource.

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"What is Close Reading?" || Definition and Strategies

"what is close reading": a literary guide for english students and teachers.

View the full series: The Oregon State Guide to English Literary Terms

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What is Close Reading? Transcript (English and Spanish Subtitles Available in Video, Click HERE for Spanish Transcript)

By Clare Braun , Oregon State University Senior Lecturer in English

24 October 2022

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.

close_reading_common_core.jpg

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 Oregon State Guide to Literary Terms includes videos on imagery, figurative language, motif, and so on—most of the videos in this series employ close reading!

close_reading_literary_device_examples.jpg

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.

close_reading_annotation_example.jpg

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.

close_reading_strategy_example.jpg

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.

So, what isn’t close reading?  It’s not focused just on what happened in the text—the content; that’s summary.  It doesn’t speculate on the effect of the text on the reader, which is not something you can directly observe in the text.  It typically doesn’t require secondary sources, though you can use close reading with other forms of analysis that do rely on secondary sources.  It’s not the discovery of the one “right” answer of what a text means, because there are many ways to observe and interpret a text.  But it's also not a free-for-all where any reading of a text is correct because everything is interpretation anyway.   

Close reading isn’t the only way to usefully and productively engage with a text.  But it is often a useful mode of analysis because it is so grounded in the text, digging deeply into its layers of meaning.

Want to cite this?

MLA Citation: Braun, Clare. "What is Close Reading?" Oregon State Guide to English Literary Terms, 24 Oct. 2022, Oregon State University, liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-close-reading-definition-and-strategies. Accessed [insert date].

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How to Write a Close Reading Essay

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This article was co-authored by Bryce Warwick, JD . Bryce Warwick is currently the President of Warwick Strategies, an organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area offering premium, personalized private tutoring for the GMAT, LSAT and GRE. Bryce has a JD from the George Washington University Law School. There are 7 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been viewed 8,851 times.

With a close-reading essay, you get to take a deep dive into a short passage from a larger text to study how the language, themes, and style create meaning. Writing one of these essays requires you to read the text slowly multiple times while paying attention to both what is being said and how the author is saying it. It’s a great way to hone your reading and analytical skills, and you’ll be surprised at how it can deepen your understanding of a particular book or text.

Reading and Analyzing the Passage

• Think of “close reading" as an opportunity to look underneath the surface. While you may understand a text’s main themes from a single read-through, any given text usually contains multiple complexities in language, character development, and hidden themes that only become clear through close observation.

Tip: Look up words that you aren’t familiar with. Sometimes you might figure out what something means by using context clues, but when in doubt, look it up.

• Alliteration
• Personification
• Onomatopoeia

• What themes are present in the text? Is the passage about, for example, love, or the triumph of good over evil, a character's coming-of-age, or a commentary on social issues?
• What imagery is being used? Which of the 5 senses does the passage involve?
• What is the author’s writing style? Is it descriptive, persuasive, or technical?
• What is the tone of the passage? What emotions do you feel as you read?
• What is the author trying to say? Are they successful?

Tip: Try reading the text out loud. Sometimes hearing the words rather than just seeing them can make a difference in how you understand the language.

• Word choice
• Punctuation

Drafting a Thesis and Outline

• Close-reading essays can get very detailed, and it often is helpful to come back to the “main thing.” This summary can help you focus your thesis in one direction so your essay doesn’t become too broad.

• For example, you could write something like, “The author uses repetition and word choice to create an emotional connection between the reader and the protagonist. This sample from the book exemplifies how the author uses vivid language and atypical syntax throughout the entire text to help put the reader inside of the protagonist’s mind.”

• For example, you may quote a sentence from the passage that uses atypical punctuation to emphasize how the author’s writing style creates a certain cadence.
• Or you may use the repetition of a color or word or theme to explain how the author continually reinforces the overall message.

• There are a lot of different ways to outline an essay. You could use a bullet-pointed list to organize the things you want to write about, or you could plan out, paragraph by paragraph, what you want to say.
• Many people cannot write fast because they do not spend enough time planning what they want to state.
• When you take a couple of extra minutes to plan an essay, it's a lot easier to write because you know how the points should flow together.
• It is also obvious to a reader whether you plan and write the essay or make it up as you write it.

Writing the Essay

• The last thing you want is to write an essay and later on realize that you were required to include an outside source or that your paper was 5 pages longer than it needed to be.

• Some people find it easier to write their introduction once the body of the essay is done.
• The introduction can be a good place to give historical, social, or geographical context.

• Make sure to reference why the proof you’re giving is relevant. It should directly tie back to the main theme of your essay.
• Evidence can be a direct quote from the passage, a summary of that information, or a reference from a secondary source.

• The conclusion isn’t the place to add in new evidence or arguments. Those should all be in the actual body of the essay.

• An impactful close-reading essay will weave together examples, interpretation, and commentary.

• Try reading your essay out loud. You may notice awkward phrases, incorrect grammar, or stilted language that you didn’t before.

Expert Q&A

• Sites like Typely, Grammarly, and ProofreadingTool offer free feedback and edits. Keep in mind that you’ll need to review proposed changes because they may not all be correct for your particular essay. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

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• ↑ https://guides.lib.uoguelph.ca/c.php?g=130967&p=4938496
• ↑ https://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/pages/how-do-close-reading#
• ↑ https://blogs.umass.edu/honors291g-cdg/how-to-write-a-close-reading-essay/
• ↑ https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/introduction/
• ↑ https://www.scribbr.com/research-paper/paragraph-structure/
• ↑ https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/conclusion/
• ↑ https://www.scribbr.com/category/academic-essay/

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DEAN’S BOOK w/ Prof. CONNIE GRIFFIN

Honors291g-cdg’s blog, how to write a close reading essay.

CLOSE READING The purpose of close reading is to suspend personal judgment and examine a text in order to uncover and discover as much information as we can from it. In close reading we ask not just “what does this passage say?” but also “how does it say it?” and even “what does it not say?” Close reading takes us deeper into the passage, below its surface to the deeper structures of its language, syntax and imagery, then out again to its connections with the whole text as well as other texts, events, and ideas. Desired Outcomes: • Identify and reflect on major themes in the book. • Analyze specific details, scenes, actions, and quotations in the text and discuss how they contribute to your interpretation of the meaning of the larger text. • Extract as much information from a chosen passage of writing as possible. • Listen to and understand others’ differing (perhaps) interpretations of the same text. • Generate questions and topics for further inquiry.

Assignment One: A Close Reading Instructions Now that you’ve finished the book, choose a passage from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and compose your own close reading of it. Apply the same techniques to this paper that were applied in in-class close readings and discussions, now taking into account the context of your chosen passage, additional selections from the text, as well as the book as a whole. Following MLA documentation style, correctly cite your chosen passage and any other quotations from the text that support your interpretations and claims. For help with MLA style, go to the Commonwealth College website (www.comcol.umass.edu) and search for “MLA format.” Organizing your close-reading essay In writing your close-reading essay, you may wish to start by introducing the book and describing your chosen passage’s importance within it. You could then offer relevant details to support your thesis. Questions you raise may appear as part of your conclusion, suggesting avenues for further thought and study. Paper length Your paper should be 650-750 words long, maximum. Be detailed but concise. Edit out unnecessary words and redundancies. (Include your selected passage in your paper, but do not count it as part of the total length.) A sample close reading essay is available online. Search the Commonwealth College website (www.comcol.umass.edu) for “close reading essay.” Questions to consider as you prepare to compose your close reading Examine the passage by itself • What does this passage explicitly say? • Is there a meaning beneath or beyond the explicit message? What is it? How is it communicated? • What might the passage suggest about the writer’s motivations? • How do the writer’s style, imagery and choice of language create a tone or intensify a meaning? • What specific examples in the passage (and additional passages) support these observations? Examine the passage in light of surrounding passages and the rest of the book • What themes running through the book are evoked explicitly and implicitly in this passage? • How does this passage fit—or not fit—into its immediate context as well as the book as a whole? What insights into the book does it reveal? • What questions does the passage raise about the story being told? • What conclusions can be drawn from this passage about the author and the text? A note about writing You should consider this paper a final version: pay attention to the quality of your writing and proofread your work. Strive to be concise and clear as well as correct. This means writing in a style that’s both academic and accessible. Always keep your audience in mind. You are writing for your interested peers. Grading This essay will be worth 15% of your final grade. Note: You will submit your paper at next week’s class. You will also be asked to summarize your paper and present its main points orally during class discussion. Therefore, you may want to jot down a few “talking points” in preparation.

Close Reading of Literary Texts

About this Strategy Guide

This strategy guide will help you choose text that is appropriate for close reading and to plan for instruction that supports students' development of the habits associated with careful, multi-engagement reading of literary prose and poetry.

Research Basis

Strategy in practice, related resources.

Fisher & Frey (2012) remind us that “the practice of close reading is not a new one, and in fact has existed for many decades as the practice of reading a text for a level of detail not used in everyday reading” (p. 8).  Buckley (2011) explains that “as English teachers, we have to empower all our students to use texts to construct and represent meaning skillfully, because by every measure, it gives them a better chance at having a better life” (p. 3).  She goes on to say that “all students deserve a chance to learn how to demonstrate their ambitious exploration of text” (p. 29), a notion supported by Fisher & Frey (2012) when they remind us that “close reading should be accompanied by purposeful, scaffolded instruction about the passage” (p. 8).

• Selecting a text:

When selecting a text or passage for close reading, consider two questions: First, is there enough going on with the language and craft of the text to warrant the attention of multiple readings? Second, does the understanding that comes from close reading sufficiently benefit students in light of the larger goals of the course or unit? The answer to both needs to be yes in order to keep close reading from falling into its reputation as merely an exercise.

• First, to determine the general meaning of the text (leaving knowledge and application of literary elements more or less tacit for now). Keep asking yourself, “What’s going on, and how do I know?”
• Second, to examine the ways the author uses language and the discipline-specific structures of literature to create meaning. Your focusing question here might be “How do the author’s choices help me understand or appreciate something that I didn’t notice the first time I read?”
• Third, to consider thematic meaning and connections between this text and others like it. Here, ask yourself, “What does this text cause me to think or wonder about some larger aspect the text and of the human condition?”

These purposes are certainly not exclusive of each other, and do not necessarily happen in the order listed here, but having these multiple purposes helps students see the value in re-reading text they might otherwise work quickly through just once to “get the gist.” See the Close Reading Planning Sheet for a printable guide to this process.

This process is not unlike preparing for a think-aloud, only here, you work is not to plan what you will say about your understanding of the text as you read, but rather to think of the places where you want to prompt students’ thinking with questions that cause them to consider the text carefully.

• Developing text-dependent questions and accompanying learning activities:

You can see the Sample Close Reading Questions that resulted of my multiple readings of the first section of the short story “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry and the poem “Latin Deli” by Judith Ortiz Cofer. The questions are listed here for clarity as first read, second read, third read to show how the focus of questioning might change over multiple readings. You would decide, of course, how the questions were actually asked with each reading, how much time should pass between readings, and so forth.

Remember that close reading should be embedded in an instructional context that values not only the careful attention to text that the questions prompt, but also writing, collaboration, and talk. The specific ways in which you balance these elements will vary, but the scaffolding provided by the text-dependent questions you prepared will likely connect them all.

More Ideas to Try

• If the deep understanding they develop through the process does not extend into meaningful talk or writing, students will see close reading questions as an end themselves, rather than a means. See the Writing Arguments about Literature Strategy Guide for ideas on framing close reading around a larger writing task.
• Providing students with close reading questions is a scaffold to the actual task of reading and re-reading carefully. After they use questions you’ve prepared, have students dissect the kinds of thinking each reading represented. Use this discussion to prompt them to develop multiple sets of close reading questions for a text.
• Lesson Plans
• Professional Library
• Strategy Guides

Students develop close reading skills connecting sound with sense in the poem "Those Winter Sundays," and write an original text that reflects their new learning.

Using their voices as interpretive instruments, students gain a deeper appreciation of the art of poetry as they prepare a recitation of the frequently anthologized poem "Those Winter Sundays."

Students often find poetry frustrating and meaningless. By helping students think critically about the differences between poetry and prose, this introduction sets the stage for different strategies for comprehending poetic texts.

Using several translations of the same passage of Beowulf , this lesson introduces students to the idea that translation is not an objective practice, but that it involves "imaginative reconstruction."

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Doyle Online Writing Lab

Close reading assignments.

"A close reading (or Explication de texte) operates on the premise that any artistic creation will be more fully understood and appreciated to the extent that the nature and interrelations of its parts are perceived, and that that understanding will take the form of insight into the theme of the work in question. This kind of work must be done before you can begin to appropriate any theoretical or specific approach." 1

To explicate comes from the Latin explicare, to unfold, to fold out, or to make clear the meaning of. When you close read, you observe facts and details about the text. Your aim is to notice all striking features of the text, including rhetorical features, structural elements, cultural references or allusions. A close reading should be more than a list of devices, though. The essay should move from observation of particular facts and details to a conclusion, or interpretation, based on those observations. What do these data add up to mean? 2

Close reading has three primary objectives.

It encourages you to be a better and more careful reader.

It asks you to employ the tools you heard used in lecture and probably have employed yourself in conference: analysis of speaker, diction, figurative language, sound, and genre to name a few.

• It engages you in the act of synthesis. Even as you divide the passage or object poem into its composite elements, you will want to discuss how those elements come together to form a whole.

Requirements: What does a Close Reading Essay Usually Have?

A thesis that is an assertion about the meaning and function of the text . It must be something you can argue for and prove in your essay.

Evidence from the text . What specific words or phrases led you to have the ideas you express? Quote them.

Analysis of that evidence . If the work were self-evident you could just turn in the book or image as your proof. Literally thousands of people have had thousands of different ideas about the words or details you mention. Explain how you arrived at your ideas.

Need More Help?

See the following pages:

• How to Annotate
• Close Readings of Passages
• Close Readings of Visual Artifacts

1 The Literary Link. Ed. Janice E. Patten. June 2, 1998. San Jose State University Web Site. 17 Sept. 2003. . 2 Patricia Kain, "How to Do a Close Reading," 1998. Harvard University Writing Center Web Site . 17 Sept. 2003. 3 Diane Hacker. The Bedford Handbook for Writers, 3rd. ed. Boson: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1991. 91.

English and Comparative Literary Studies

Example close reading.

Below is an example of a close reading written for the module by a now-graduated student. It demonstrates how to focus on the text and balance close reading with cultural context (although is slightly longer than the essays we now ask you to write).

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 'Mont Blanc' (ll. 1-48)

(Chloe Todd-Fordham)

In A Defence of Poetry , Shelley states: ‘[poetry] creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos […] it compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know’ (954). In 'Mont Blanc,' Shelley illustrates a vision of familiarity turned to chaos and creates a landscape of ‘dizzying wonder’ (Journal-letter to Thomas Love Peacock) ‘an awful scene’ (l. 15) that terrifies with its immensity. Shelley’s subject is a vast, immeasurable, all-encompassing landscape; an ‘everlasting universe of things’ (1). In 'Mont Blanc,' the reader is, at first, confronted with ‘the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought’ ( A Defence of Poetry 949) as Shelley confuses imagery of enormity and confine, interior and exterior, permanence and transience and separates the human mind from the natural world. To Shelley, the mind is no more than a constant creative channel through which nature flows and ‘rolls its rapid waves’ (l. 2). It is the poetic imagination that unites this limitless landscape with the miniature mind. In a ‘trance sublime and strange’ (l. 35), Shelley transforms perception into feeling and knowledge into poetry. The imagination turns ‘some unsculptured image’ confused by ‘many-voiced’ sounds, and ‘many-coloured’ images, into ‘one legion of wild thoughts;’ a unique sensibility exclusive to the individual. For Shelley, the mind and the natural world are organically connected, bound together by the imagination and expressed through the medium of poetry. In exploiting the natural world, Shelley exposes the individual poetic mind.

'Mont Blanc' is a conclusive poem. Certainly it is primarily descriptive but as the poem unfolds and the reader is exposed to more of Mont Blanc, an educative narrative appears which culminates in Shelley’s reasoned assertion in the final three lines of the poem. 'Mont Blanc,' in its entirety, traces the transformation of the naïve and vulnerable poet into the controlled, rational rhetorician and this progression is also apparent in the first two stanzas of 'Mont Blanc.' The first image of the poem is not supported by the comfortable invocation of the subjective ‘I’ as in Clare’s 'I am,' or Keats’ 'Ode to a Nightingale'; instead the speaker of the poem is belittled by a vast landscape, diminished by a terrifying permanence and lost in ‘the everlasting universe of things’ (1). The casual yet precise use of the word ‘things’ in the opening line suggests that Shelley’s natural world is neither specifically located nor easily contained; instead, it is ubiquitous, sweeping and all-inclusive. In comparison, the individual is tiny and alone. The speaker in 'Mont Blanc' is an absent presence. His physicality is swallowed by the aggressive surroundings so that only the restless voice of an overwhelmed mind remains in the poetry.

A clutter of inconsistent images characterises the poetic voice, reducing it to a mere ‘sound but half its own’ (l. 6). In the first two lines alone, Shelley moves from the colossal to the miniature, the exterior to the interior, and the panoramic to the personal. In a tight, controlled, eleven line pentameter verse, the reader is exposed to a slideshow of images which come into focus briefly and then dissolve each into each. Permanent vocabulary – ‘ceaselessly’, ‘forever’, ‘everlasting’ – follows sporadic, fleeting, kinetic verbs; ‘bursts’, ‘raves’, ‘leaps’, passive mountains and constant rocks are attacked by ‘vast rivers,’ while darkness is usurped by light within a single line. The rhythm and movement of lines such as: ‘Now dark, now glittering, now reflecting gloom Now lending splendour…’ (ll. 3-4) imitate the constant fading and illumination of images. With the incessant repetition of ‘now’, the line seemingly blinks between dark and light, and the concept of time is lost to the imminent urgency of the word ‘now’. Until line 34, Shelley’s landscape is not exclusively his own; instead it is a collective experience, ‘many-coloured’ and ‘many-voiced’. The vision of 'Mont Blanc' is ‘a dizzying wonder […] not unallied to madness’ (Journal-letter to Thomas Love Peacock 844). Thoughts are likened to ‘chainless winds’, the senses are confused and mingled in lines such as ‘to drink their odours’ (l. 23), dark transforms abruptly into light in the line; ‘…caverns sail / Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams’ (ll. 14-15), and the landscape is filled with this ‘old solemn harmony’ (l. 24), ‘a loud lone sound no other sound can tame’ (l. 31). Nature is both assuredly permanent and restlessly ephemeral. Shelley vividly describes ‘an awful scene’ (15); frightening, savage, destructive and devoid of human contact. With these images, Shelley seeks to overwhelm his reader. Both the reader and the poet are vulnerable and impressionable, their minds exposed to the terrifying force of the natural world.

Paradoxically, fear and irrationality are conveyed in a rigid, formal structure. The iambic pentameter becomes the heartbeat of the poem, driving it forward to a conclusion. Like Mont Blanc, the regular pulse of the metre and the delicately placed rhymes and half-rhymes make the poem an organic construct. Ironically, 'Mont Blanc' is not ‘some unsculptured image’ but is a carefully chiselled poem, from start to finish. Shelley’s oscillating images are seemingly ‘spontaneous overflows’, ("Preface" to The Lyrical Ballads ) ‘wild thoughts’ that ‘burst and rave’ but the elevated blank verse suggests that, while Shelley seems forever searching for his own voice in the ‘many-voiced vale’, it is, in fact, there from the beginning. The exclamatory climax to Part II, ‘thou art there!’ is forty-eight lines too late.

When the iambic pentameter does fall apart it is calculated. As ‘the voices in the desert fail’, Shelley is subjected to a dialogue implicit in nature. Both the speaker and the reader are made dizzy by a sickening of the senses and the continual oscillation of imagery. In the following quotation, Shelley employs anaphora, caesura and repetition to create an accumulation of replicated words, an intense build-up of enduring imagery and a didactic, pulsating rhythm which climaxes with the exclamation. ‘Dizzy ravine!’: ‘A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame: Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion, Thou art the path of that unresting sound…’ (ll. 31-3) With the expletive ‘Dizzy Ravine!’ there is sudden release and the overwhelmed mind of both the poet and the reader is soothed by the comforting evocation of the subjective ‘I’. Shelley has experienced – in his own words – ‘the sublime’. ‘Dizzy ravine!’ is an ‘awful’ expression of fear, a temporary paralysis of language, a sudden gasp which disrupts the natural rhythm of blank verse; indeed, the shape, movement and pace of the poem in these lines imitates the sensation of the sublime.

With the introduction of the first-person, Shelley claims the language as his own and asserts control. At last, specificity invades the terrifying collage of contradictions cocooned within the mind of the poet, and trapped in the pentameter of Part I; Shelley sees Mont Blanc with a cleansed perspective. As rationalist, Shelley takes possession of the language, vocabulary and metre of the poem; ‘the voices of the desert’ meld into one unique voice and the oxymoronic images of dark and light, sleep and unrest, interior and exterior are arrested in ‘one legion of wild thoughts’ by a formal, empirical - almost scientific and political - language: ‘My own, my human mind, which passively Now renders and receives fast influencings, Holding an unremitting interchange…’ (ll. 38-40) Nature and the poetic mind become one and the same thing at this point in the poem. The human mind is a microcosm of the natural world; it is both untamed and tranquil. Just as ‘the woods and winds contend[ing]’ in part I allegorise the divided conscience and the ‘secret springs’ act as a metaphor for the private, unfathomed wealth of the imagination, the mingling of ‘thou’ with the pronoun ‘I’ in lines 34-35 confuses the subjectivity of the poem so that the natural world and the human mind are bound together by the imagination. The human mind is constant and fixed - as is Mont Blanc – while nature is constantly changing and moving – as is Mont Blanc’s verdant decoration; ‘the vast rivers’ and ‘the wild woods’. As Shelley states in a Journal-letter to Thomas Love Peacock, nature and the mind inseparable: ‘…one would think that Mont Blanc was a living being, and that the frozen blood forever circulated through his stony veins’ (844) Unlike the passive human mind, the imagination is active; it ‘seeks among the shadows’, processes knowledge into art, sorts through the ‘many coloured’ perspectives of a terrifying world and arrives at one single unifying vision, unique to the individual. The imagination is real, unlike the images it creates. Like the material delusion that is poetry, like the artificial literary construct of ‘the gothic’ that Shelley alludes to in the following lines: ‘Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, Some phantom, some faint image…’ (ll. 46-47) poetry, to Shelley, cannot be wholly authentic. Shelley cannot replicate reality as Wordsworth sought to do in The Lyrical Ballads ; instead, Mont Blanc is ‘a faint image’ of the natural world. Indeed, in 'Mont Blanc,' Shelley’s vulnerable, frightened speaker arrives at the conclusion that poetry is ‘a mirror which makes beautiful that which it distorts’. ( A Defence of Poetry 947) The imagination is a means to control ‘the everlasting universe of things’, to process thoughts and prompt the ‘secret springs’ of poetic expression; it ‘compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know’ (954).

It is ‘in the still cave of the witch Poesy’, ‘among the shadows’, where the imagination marries nature to the human mind. Here, the ‘universe of things’ is no longer alarmingly permanent, idealistic and ‘everlasting’; instead, it is definitive, exact, ‘clear.’ In contrast to the destructive, ‘Power’ that bursts ‘through these dark mountains like the flame’ (l. 19), the final image of Part II is one of softness and tranquillity:

‘Now float above thy darkness, and now rest […] In the still cave of the witch Poesy.’ (ll. 42-44) With the affirmative exclamation ‘thou art there!’ Shelley’s desperate search for external stimuli has led him, not into the wilderness of the natural world, but inside himself, into ‘the still cave of the witch poesy’, to the reality of his own poetic imagination.

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Close Reading Strategies: A Step-by-Step Teaching Guide

Slow down, think, annotate, and reflect.

In the age of ChatGPT and other AI , using close reading strategies doesn’t come naturally to students. When students get a new assignment, their first instinct may be to race to the finish line rather than engage with text. This means students will miss a lot of nuance and meaning as they move through school.

On the other hand, a close reading of text requires students to slow down, think, annotate, and reflect. The ultimate idea? We get more information and enjoyment from reading and working with the text when we use close reading strategies.

What is close reading?

Close reading is a way to read and work with text that moves beyond comprehension into interpretation and analysis. Put another way, close reading helps readers get from literal to inferential understanding of text.

After a close reading, students should understand what the text says and understand ideas embedded in the text, like a cultural perspective or religious opinion. They’ll also have an idea of what the text means to them, and what their opinion about it is based on more than just an offhand feeling. In class, close reading may take multiple class periods to complete and should have a goal at the end—a discussion or essay or some way for students to share what they’ve learned.

Read more: What is close reading anyway?

Here is our step-by-step  guide with strategies for teaching close reading:

1. choose the perfect passage.

Image: Jennifer Findley

As you’re planning texts for a lesson or unit, start with what you want students to get out of what they’re reading. So, if you’re studying text structure, choose books or articles with interesting text structures. If you’re studying character development, find a passage that shows how a character changes or evolves. The point: There has to be something to find in text so that students aren’t grasping at straws.

Read more: How To Choose the Perfect Passage for Close Reading

Tip: Texts should be at or just above students’ grade and reading level, but they don’t have to be dense with text. Here’s how to use picture books in close reading lessons .

2. Prepare students by teaching annotation

Source: The English Classroom

Close reading will require some prep work. Students have to know how to annotate effectively, pulling out and making notes on the most important parts, i.e., not highlighting everything. Spend some time at the start of the year or unit teaching students how to identify and mark the most important parts of a text (new or key words, main ideas, pivotal plot points).

3. Students read the text for literal comprehension

First, have students read the entire text. The text should take less than one class period to read through once, so a chapter or article or even a few paragraphs could be enough. The first time students read, they’re reading for a general understanding and the main idea. They can think through:

• What is this story about?
• What information does this article contain?
• What is literally happening?
• What is the message or purpose?

4. Check in

After the first reading, check in with students to make sure they have a clear, literal understanding of the text. If they don’t, clear up misconceptions. If they do, move on to the second reading.

5. Chunk text in preparation for read 2

Image: iTeach. iCoach. iBlog.

Before the second reading, have students separate the text into paragraphs or chunks. Number each chunk. This way, when students review the text, they can easily refer back to paragraph 1 or chunk 2 and all be on the same page.

6. Work with text-dependent questions

Image: Instructional Coach

Now that students have a clear understanding of what the text is about, introduce the text-dependent questions that students will be working with in their close reading. Text-dependent questions are those that can only be answered using the text. For example, a question like “Why did Jeremiah eat a bullfrog?” rather than “Why is it not a good idea to eat a bullfrog?”

Questions that you work with should also range in their complexity. If the passage is more complex in terms of structure, content, or vocabulary, the questions may be less complex. But if a passage is easier for students to work with, the questions can be more advanced.

7. Set the end goal

Students shouldn’t be reading just to read. Explain the end goal—a Socratic seminar discussion, a partner discussion, an essay, a project. Once students know how they are going to respond to the questions, they’re better able to think through how they’re going to show what they know.

Here are creative ways to use close reading .

8. Time for reads 2 and 3

Image: Reading Ladies

Now that students have the question, the text, and the end goal, they’re ready to reread. The second time students read the text, they’re reading it to annotate for their own understanding. This is also the point where you’ll want to break students into groups—which students can work independently and which need some, or a lot of, support to complete the read?

Some texts will require a third reading for students to fully prepare, or students may need to reread chunks or paragraphs even more to get what they need. The important part is that students understand that rereading is an important part of close reading.

9. Respond to the text

This is it! The final close reading discussion. In this response, students will:

• Summarize what they read.
• Answer the text-dependent questions.
• Include evidence to support their ideas.
• Draw conclusions about the meaning of the text.

Have some way for students to plan out what they are going to say or write, and have them turn in their annotated reading so you can refer back to it if you’re confused about how they got from point A to Z.

10. Reflect

Every so often, reflect on how close reading is changing what students are taking away from what they read. Close reading should shape their reading skills and how they approach text beyond your class, but students may need support seeing the connection.

11. Level up

As students get more comfortable with close reading, you can level up their discussions by:

• Having students develop their own questions after they read a text or as you progress through a longer text.
• Using texts that are more complex in terms of content or structure.
• Challenging students to do a close reading of a picture book or graphic novel, rather than full-on text.

What strategies do you use to teach close reading in your classroom? Share in our WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group  on Facebook.

Read why close reading can be the most fun lesson in your week ..

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Poetry: Close Reading

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Introduction

Once somewhat ignored in scholarly circles, close reading of poetry is making something of a comeback. By learning how to close read a poem you can significantly increase both your understanding and enjoyment of the poem. You may also increase your ability to write convincingly about the poem.

The following exercise uses one of William Shakespeare’s sonnets (#116) as an example. This close read process can also be used on many different verse forms. This resource first presents the entire sonnet and then presents a close reading of the poem below. Read the sonnet a few times to get a feel for it and then move down to the close reading.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Performing the close read

The number indicates the sonnet’s place in a cycle or sequence of sonnets. Although you may examine the poem on its own terms, realize that it is connected to the other poems in the cycle.

Admit impediments.

Form is one of the first things you should note about a poem. Here it is easy to see that the poem is fourteen lines long and follows some sort of rhyme scheme (which you can see by looking at how the final words in each line). The rhyme of words makes a connection between them. Our first rhyme combination is “minds/finds.” What do you make of this pairing of words?

The first phrase (in this case a full sentence) of the poem flows into the next line of the poem. This is called enjambment, and though it is often made necessary by the form of the verse, it also serves to break up the reader’s expectations. In this case, the word “impediments” is placed directly before the bleak and confusing phrase “love is not love,” itself an enjambment. How does this disconnection between phrase and line affect the reader? How does it emphasize or change the lines around it?

Love is not love

O r bends with the remover to remove:

Notice all of the repetition or use of similar words in the last two and a half lines. When close reading a poem, especially a fixed verse form like the sonnet, remember the economy of the poem: there’s only so much space at the poet’s disposal. This makes repetition very important, because it places even more emphasis on the repeated word than does prose. What does the repetition in these lines suggest? Also, note that we’ve come to the end of our first quatrain (four-line stanza): usually the first stanza of a sonnet proposes the problem for the poem. What is this problem?

Our next quatrain gives a pair of metaphors ( click here to read about metaphors, or click here ) for the “thesis” argued in the first stanza. Look carefully at these images as they relate to the subject of the poem. What actual objects do they describe? Do they bear any similarity to each other? Is there a connection between the use of “ever-“ in line 5 and “every” in line seven?

The image in lines 5-6 is especially complex: What is the “mark” Shakespeare is talking about and how does it “look?” Answers to some of these questions may require some research into older definitions of words in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Our third and final quatrain uses all of its four lines to expand a single metaphor. Consider how this metaphor relates to the previous ones, and why so much space in the poem is devoted to it, especially as it relates to the poem’s argument. Also, look at similarity of phrasing between line 9’s “rosy lips and cheeks” and line 11’s “brief hours and weeks.” They certainly rhyme, but how does the similar construction affect the reading?

This is our closing couplet (two-line stanza), meant to “resolve” the problem addressed in the poem. Look carefully at the way the couplet starts. Does it provide resolution or not? Note that the first person (“me/I”) has returned (last seen in the first line of the poem). Consider also the negations in the final statement. Have we seen something similar in the poem before? Where and why are the connections made?

From reading to writing

The observations and questions in the close reading notes are by no means complete, but a look over them suggests several possibilities for a paper. Among these possibilities are:

• The repetition of similar words and phrases in the poem
• The use and relationship of the three main metaphors in the poem
• The ambiguity, which begins (“let” suggests that something may or may not be allowed to happen) and ends (the weighty word “if”) the poem
• The connection between the physical and the spiritual.

These ideas need not be exclusive, either. The observations gained from the close reading should provide you with examples and insight for anyone of the proposed essays listed above.