Close Reading

According to Patricia Kain close reading involves observing facts and details about a text. You basically walk yourself through a piece of writing interpreting every sentence with your own ideas. The first step to close reading is "annotating" the text. When you do this you can come back to certain things you read that you questioned or thought were interesting or surprising. The second step to close reading is noticing any repetition in the text or any similarities. Noticing similarities helps you link together things the author is saying which aids in understanding the full message of the text. Step three is asking questions about those similarities. Here is when you make the information that you found in the text useful. By asking questions about the patterns in the text you will come up with answers that make the text's message more clear. For example in the reading when the close reader notices the author's use of the word universe. Talking about how the spider has it's own universe, and that his senses don't go past that universe. She links this with the author trying to say that, like the spider, our universe is also finite and that there could be more that we are just not aware of.

Another reading I found about Close Reading (https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/reading_lit.html) agree's with the previous reading. He add's in Characterization as a step however. How does what the author is saying make you feel about the character in this reading? How is it supposed to make you feel? By understanding this step you are understanding what the author is trying to say or how the author is trying to make you feel with this piece of writing. By understanding, also the characters within a text you can make even more connections to the rest of the reading.

No matter what you read about close reading, there is one basic concept. Close reading involves thinking and being creative. It almost ties back to our first Emerson reading. To read well you must be an inventor. That is the concept close reading deals with. Thinking about connections, language and people in a reading, asking questions and drawing conclusions which lead to fully comprehending what the author is trying to say.