Example of a Close Reading in an Essay to Show Students
Close reading
Elaine Showalter describes close reading as:
...slow reading, a deliberate endeavour to detach ourselves from the magical power of story-telling and pay attention to linguistic communication, imagery, allusion, intertextuality, syntax and grade.
Information technology is, in her words, 'a form of defamiliarisation nosotros utilize in order to break through our habitual and casual reading practices' (Didactics Literature, 98).
Equally readers, we are accepted to reading for plot, or allowing the joy of the reading experience to take over and conduct u.s. forth, without stopping to ask how and why a particular passage, sentence, or discussion achieves its furnishings.
Close reading, so, is about pausing, and looking at the precise techniques, dynamics, and content of the text. It's not reading betwixt the lines, simply reading further and further into the lines and seeing the multiple meanings a plow of phrase, a description, or a word can unlock.
It is possible to close read an extended passage, but for essays information technology is often a skillful technique to practise the close reading start and so to use very curt extracts or even single words to demonstrate your insights. So instead of doing a close reading of twenty lines from A Midsummer Night'due south Dream *in* your essay, you lot would do it independently, and and so cite and explicate three key phrases, relating them clearly to your developing statement.
Shut reading is as well sometimes known every bit 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 heed, he gave students poems without any information well-nigh who wrote them or why they were written.
In the hands of subsequent critics, similar William Empson, the technique became a manner to offer virtuoso accounts of particular poems and literary works, with an emphasis on ambivalence and the multiplication of possible meanings.
In essence, close reading ways taking a step dorsum from the larger narrative and examining the elective parts of a text.
Recollect of shut reading as something that you practise with a pencil and book in your paw. Mark up the pages; fill the margins.
And then transcribe the poem, the passage, the quotation.
Authentic transcription of quotations is, for some, the first and concluding dominion of close reading. If your passage isn't transcribed meticulously, down to the terminal comma and (with poesy) spacing on the folio, you tin can't read it closely.
Conscientious transcription will also help you become inside a passage: you'll get a feel for its rhythms, its twists and turns, its breathing. Wait at the words.
Don't accept your optics off the words. Work from the actual text in front end of y'all, not from a sort of mental paraphrase of what the text says. Equally you practise then, remember to think carefully almost sound, non only when reading verse just 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 centre can often glide over aspects of a text that the ear is groovy to option upward. Call up, too, that it's of import non merely to discover sure features just also to consider their furnishings. If you need to pause to take hold of your jiff in the middle of a sentence, ask yourself why. How are form and content working together?
Close, not closed readings
Shut 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 of import to retrieve about the purpose backside your close reading – we are looking for close readings, not airtight readings. Essentially, the shut 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 demand to stitch that revelation about the complexities and ambiguities of particular terms, phrases and passages into a larger statement or context – don't simply listing everything y'all accept constitute; craft it into an statement, and be prepared to downplay or leave out some of the elements yous have spotted if they don't relate to the larger picture.
For this reason, y'all might want to follow the "Rule of 2". Your analysis of your quotation should be twice as long equally the quotation itself. It's a nice reminder that nosotros always need to go back and explain the textual prove that'southward being cited.
Each slice of textual prove needs and deserves detailed analysis if it's existence used to support the argument's claims. Information technology likewise helps to remind united states to vary the lengths of quoted textual prove so that an essay doesn't end up with simply very brief quotations or long block quotations, but includes a mixture of different lengths that will best suit the claim beingness adult at whatever given bespeak in the argument.
Some questions you may similar to ask
- Who is speaking? Who is existence 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 audition 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 practiced 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 practise they do instead)?
- What generic clues are here (what kinds of writing are hinted at)?
- Are at that place words or phrases which are ambiguous (could mean more than one matter)? If so, are we directed to privilege one reading over the other or exercise we go along both in play? Does one meaning open up up an culling story/history/narrative? What are the connotations of the words that are chosen? Do any of them open up new or different contexts?
- Are in that location patterns which emerge in the language (the repetition of words or of certain kinds of words? Repeated phrases? Rhymes or one-half-rhymes? Metrical patterns?). What furnishings practice they create?
- Is there whatever movement in the passage you are reading? Are in that location any shapes or dominant metaphors?
- What kind of rhythm does the passage have? What is its cadence?
- Is there anything that troubles y'all about the passage or that you're not certain you fully understand?
- Have you lot been to the dictionary (retrieve the full Oxford English language 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 Picture
- Ways of Reading a Play
- Ways of Reading a Translation
Extra Reading (and remember you can close read secondary likewise equally chief 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), Shut Reading: the Reader (Duke, 2002).
Christopher Ricks, The Forcefulness 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'due south a great example by Patricia Kain at Harvard Higher's Writing Eye.
Trev Broughton, Alexandra Kingston-Reese, Chloe Wigston-Smith, Hannah Roche, Helen Smith, and Matthew Townend April 2018
This commodity is available to download for free as a PDF for use every bit a personal learning tool or for use in the classroom as a instruction resource.
Download Close Reading (PDF 
, 898kb)
Source: https://www.york.ac.uk/english/writing-at-york/writing-resources/close-reading/
0 Response to "Example of a Close Reading in an Essay to Show Students"
Post a Comment