It is when you begin to answer these questions that you are ready to participate thoughtfully in class discussion or write a literary analysis paper that makes the most of your close reading work.Ĭlose reading sometimes feels like over-analyzing, but don’t worry. The process of close reading should produce a lot of questions. For example, if an author writes a novel in the form of a personal journal about a character’s daily life, but that journal reads like a series of lab reports, what do we learn about that character? What is the effect of picking a word like “tome” instead of “book”? In effect, you are putting the author’s choices under a microscope. Literary analysis involves examining these components, which allows us to find in small parts of the text clues to help us understand the whole.
Close reading is deep analysis of how a literary text works it is both a reading process and something you include in a literary analysis paper, though in a refined form.įiction writers and poets build texts out of many central components, including subject, form, and specific word choices. When your teachers or professors ask you to analyze a literary text, they often look for something frequently called close reading.
