Getting students to think for themselves, base their ideas on evidence, and question what they are reading—if I can accomplish this, I’ll be content.  And the way that I do this is by teaching close reading.

But what do I mean when I say close reading?

Close reading is careful reading—paying attention to the details of the text so that nothing is missed.  This is just as important for reading a set of directions to assemble a chair as it is for reading poetry from the Harlem Renaissance.  

Close reading is also about relying only on what is in the text.  The desire to see what we want, hear what we want, and read what we want in spite of what is really there is fairly universal.  But learning the importance of basing ideas on evidence, whether that is textual or scientific, is important if we want to know and speak the truth.  

And for me, the best part of close reading, what makes it worthwhile to go through all that text and questions and specific words and their meaning is that close reading is about questioning.  There is always the author’s intended message, but there is also the unintended message.  There are all those messes that come from being a creation of a living human being that sneak into any text.  It is part of our job as readers to find those messes, to see the unintended ideas, and to question them.  Often the unintended ideas are more important than the intended ones.

And this is how I bring my classes through the close reading of a text.

The first step is to get a general understanding of the main idea.  This does not mean a summary of the plot, though if there is one that might be a needed first step.  I always tell students to answer this question:  If you could meet the author of this text, what would he or she want you to understand as a result of reading this piece?  What point is the author making here?  This should be a statement, not a single word.

The next step is to notice which details are the most important.  I usually encourage students to go with their guts here.  If it jumps out at you as being important for some reason—as being different than the rest of the text or special or important, even if you don’t quite know why—then go with it.  It also helps for students to have a sort of checklist to go through.  What do you notice about word choice or diction, figurative language, sentence structure or length, paradoxes or contradictions, what is left out, point of view, tone or attitude?  But it’s not enough to simply identify and label these elements.

Now think about how those details either add to or take away from the original meaning that you found in the preliminary reading.  The ideas that you get when you closely analyze a text should not be the same as those that you get when you read it for the first time.  How do the choices that the author has made—about a specific word or a series of sentences—affect the reader?  How do they make you feel?  What do they remind you of or what associations do you have with those words or phrases?  

Once you have analyzed those pieces, focus in a little more on the paradoxes and contradictions.  What are the unintended meanings here, and to what extent to they overtake the intended message?  If the text was written by a living human being, it will contradict itself at some point.  This is where the work gets difficult, but it is also where I have the most fun.  Ultimately, any work of literature is always about the narrator or speaker’s conflicted feelings about the topic.  If they were not confused or figuring things out or somewhat unsure what to make of something, they wouldn’t be writing or talking about it.  These feelings may be those of the author, or they might not be—of this we can never quite be sure.

I know that it might seem a little scary for teachers to encourage their students to question what they are told, but to me, in my attempt to create responsible members of society, that is the most important lesson that I teach.  Need passages to teach close reading (and some questions to get students writing about those passages)?  Check out this resource.

Christina Gil was a high-school English teacher for sixteen years, but she recently left the classroom to follow a dream and move with her family to an ecovillage in rural Missouri. She believes that teaching creative writing helps students excel on standardized tests, that deeply analyzing and unpacking a poem is a fabulous way to spend an hour or so, and that Shakespeare is always better with sound effects. When she is not hauling water to her tiny home, she can be found homeschooling her two kids or meeting with her neighbors about the best way to run their village.