Learning to Unlock Texts: Close reading

Now that the holiday season is over, I'm back with the rest of my series about textual analysis! (You can check out part 1 and part 2 from last year if you need a refresher.) These next few instalments will be focusing on different methods of analysis, before we wrap up with a final post on the topic in April. In the meantime, let's get analytical!

The next step on our analytical journey is to look at ways in which we can gather evidence to make our arguments with. There are different ways of doing this, and I’m going to focus on three methods in this series that are commonly used and easy to grasp. For simplicity, let’s start with the text itself and then work outwards with the other methods.

Close reading is when you make analyses based solely on the text you have before you, without discussing any related texts or context. It’s an exercise that you see a lot in exams, since it doesn’t require any supplementary materials for students to refer to and can be performed with texts that the student has no previous knowledge of. This also makes close reading a good starting point for wider analysis, especially when you encounter a text that you’re less familiar with.

When performing a close reading, you’ll be focusing primarily on techniques—how the text communicates its arguments and whether it’s effective, rather than delving into why the argument is being made or the intricacies of what is being said. If you’re only analysing using close reading (such as in an exam situation) you will be limited in how much evidence you’ll be able to glean, but the other analytical methods we’ll discuss also use close readings in conjunction with their more specific focuses, making it a very important key. In any case, an effective close reading requires a good understanding of the techniques of the medium you’re looking at, whether it’s a poem, film, novel, play, article, review... You get the idea. (Another reason close readings pop up so often in exams, right?)