A close reading essay is an in depth paper that carefully studies a short work or a section of a longer one. Rather than treat the larger themes of the work alone, a close reading essay goes into details and substantiates observations with examples from the work being examined. You need to not only make observations about parts of the work that stand out, but back them up with examples from the text. Make notes as you read don't wait until you have finished with the belief you will remember everything.

Note anything that stands out, symbols that recur or turns of phrase that don't make sense. Oftentimes the things you do not follow can lead to an important observation, so trust your instincts. Develop an outline of your essay based on your notes, putting together observations that seem related. Delve into details that puzzle you, such as why something is described oddly, or an action by a character that may not make sense.

Assemble the observations into groups, and note details to cover in the essay under each group. Write your essay from the outline fleshing out details, presenting your observations, drawing conclusions about what you feel the author is saying and backing up those conclusions with examples from the text. The more you can substantiate your observations with the author's own words the more convincing the essay will be. Go back and read the work you are examining again, in light of what you have written, to see if anything further stands out, or even if you still agree with what you have written.

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. 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. Listen to and understand others’ differing perhaps interpretations of the same text. 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 w.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. Questions you raise may appear as part of your conclusion, suggesting avenues for further thought and study. Include your selected passage in your paper, but do not count it as part of the total length. Search the commonwealth college website w.comcol.umass.edu for close reading essay. You will also be asked to summarize your paper and present its main points orally during class discussion.

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The process of writing an essay usually begins with the close reading of a text. Of course, the writer's personal experience may occasionally come into the essay, and all essays depend on the writer's own observations and knowledge. But most essays, especially academic essays, begin with a close reading of some kind of text a painting, a movie, an event and usually with that of a written text. Your aim may be to notice all striking features of the text, including rhetorical features, structural elements, cultural references or, your aim may be to notice only selected features of the text for instance, oppositions and correspondences, or particular historical references. Either way, making these observations constitutes the first step in the process of close reading. What we're basically talking about here is inductive reasoning: moving from the observation of particular facts and details to a conclusion, or interpretation, based on those observations.

And, as with inductive reasoning, close reading requires careful gathering of data your observations and careful thinking about what these data add up to. how to begin: 1. read with a pencil in hand, and annotate the text. annotating means underlining or highlighting key words and phrases anything that strikes you as surprising or significant, or that raises questions as well as making notes in the margins. When we respond to a text in this way, we not only force ourselves to pay close attention, but we also begin to think with the author about the evidence the first step in moving from reader to writer. I had come up a long gulch looking for fossils, and there, just at eye level, lurked a huge yellow and black orb spider, whose web was moored to the tall spears of buffalo grass at the edge of the arroyo. It was her universe, and her senses did not extend beyond the lines and spokes of the great wheel she inhabited.

Her extended claws could feel every vibration throughout that delicate structure. She knew the tug of wind, the fall of a raindrop, the flutter of a trapped moth's wing. Down one spoke of the web ran a stout ribbon of gossamer on which she could hurry out to investigate her prey. Anything that had brushed claw or wing against that amazing snare would be thoroughly entrapped. As the vibrations slowed, i could see the owner fingering her guidelines for signs of struggle. A pencil point was an intrusion into this universe for which no precedent existed.

As i proceeded on my way along the gully, like a vast impossible shadow, i realized that in the world of spider i did not exist. 2. look for patterns in the things you've noticed about the text repetitions, contradictions, similarities. what do we notice in the previous passage? first, eiseley tells us that the orb spider taught him a lesson, thus inviting us to consider what that lesson might be. But we'll let that larger question go for now and focus on particulars we're working inductively. In eiseley's next sentence, we find that this encounter happened far away on a rainy morning in the west. This opening locates us in another time, another place, and has echoes of the traditional fairy tale opening: once upon a time. What does this mean? why would eiseley want to remind us of tales and myth? we don't know yet, but it's curious.

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Details of language convince us of our location in the west gulch, arroyo, and buffalo grass. beyond that, though, eiseley calls the spider's web her universe and the great wheel she inhabited, as in the great wheel of the heavens, the galaxies. And the spider, she, whose senses did not extend beyond her universe, knows the flutter of a trapped moth's wing and hurries to investigate her prey. These details of language, and others, characterize the owner of the web as thinking, feeling, striving a creature much like ourselves. But so what? 3. ask questions about the patterns you've noticed especially how and why. to answer some of our own questions, we have to look back at the text and see what else is going on. For instance, when eiseley touches the web with his pencil point an event for which no precedent existed the spider, naturally, can make no sense of the pencil phenomenon: spider was circumscribed by spider ideas. But why vast and impossible, why a shadow? does eiseley mean god, extra terrestrials? or something else, something we cannot name or even imagine? is this the lesson? now we see that the sense of tale telling or myth at the start of the passage, plus this reference to something vast and unseen, weighs against a simple e.t.

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And though the spider can't explain, or even apprehend, eiseley's pencil point, that pencil point is explainable rational after all. We need more evidence, so we go back to the text the whole essay now, not just this one passage and look for additional clues. And as we proceed in this way, paying close attention to the evidence, asking questions, formulating interpretations, we engage in a process that is central to essay writing and to the whole academic enterprise: in other words, we reason toward our own ideas. copyright 1998, patricia kain, for the writing center at harvard university by shasta turner a close reading is a paper usually 4 to 5 pages long, but sometimes longer on a short poem or an excerpt from a longer poem or prose work. And from right to left along the lighted shore moved a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman. 'she walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high her hair was done in the shape of a helmet she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck bizarre things, charms, gifts of witchmen, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step.

She was savage and superb, wild eyed and magnificent there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.' 1 joseph conrad, via his narrator marlow, introduces the anonymous native woman at kurtz's camp as a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman 99. This woman distinguishes herself from the other primitives at kurtz's camp by stepping out of a mass of dark human shapes that represent natives at the gloomy border of the forest 98.2 despite her spatial distance from the indistinct human mass with which marlow contrasts her, she retains an abstruse and apparitional quality she appears to marlow as both feral and attractive, as bodily yet otherworldly. This paper argues that the woman's ambiguous presentation in conrad's text illuminates a complex intersection of savage and civilized spheres as marlow portrays them. She is associated by virtue of her bronze ornamentation and by her birth with marlow's description of the natives' skin color: to him, the savages resemble dark and glittering bronze 97. At the same time, the lavish richness of her dress and jewels bespeak an alliance most likely as a mistress with kurtz, whose power to acquire and distribute goods in the station is absolute.

In just as powerful a manner, however, marlow associates the woman with the sorrowful land, the immense wilderness of the earth itself. These various associations generate profound alienation and silence mdash wild sorrow and dumb pain 99 mdash that manifest themselves in the richly descriptive narrative style with which conrad constructs marlow's speech. The passage begins by cataloguing the woman's clothing and bearing in language that indicates refinement and savagery, pride and defensiveness. Each clause builds with adverbs and adjectives that layer one image upon another. This grammatical layering enhances the narrative complexity of the woman's portrayal. She walks with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments 99.