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By Clare Braun, Oregon State University Senior Lecturer in English
24 October 2022
You may have encountered the term “close reading” in high school or university settings. It’s been thrown around a lot in recent years thanks to its inclusion in the Common Core Standards for K12 education in the United States. But the practice of close reading has been around a lot longer than the Common Core, and at this point the term has been used in so many different contexts that its meaning has gotten a little muddled.
So how does the Common Core’s use of “close reading” compare to a literary scholar’s use of the term?
The Common Core Standard mentions citing “specific textual evidence” to “support conclusions drawn from the text,” and this could function as a very basic definition of “close reading” in the way that scholars conceive of the term.
For scholars, “close reading” is a mode of analysis—one of many possible modes, many of which can be used in conjunction with one another—that moves a reader beyond comprehension of the text to interpretation of the text.
A lot of the time we use close reading to uncover and explore a text’s underlying ideologies—or the ideas embedded in the text’s point of view, ideas that aren’t givens (like the laws of physics) but that are culturally or socially constructed, and usually ideas that aren’t universal even within a given culture or society.
We use close reading to make new knowledge out of our interactions with a text, which is why your instructors in high school and college might ask you to use close reading to write an essay, since the United States higher education system values the production of new knowledge.
So what does it look like to “do” close reading?
When you close read a text, you’re looking at both what the text says (its content), and how the text says what it says—through imagery, figurative language, motif, and so on. You might have noticed that the Oregon State Guide to Literary Terms includes videos on imagery, figurative language, motif, and so on—most of the videos in this series employ close reading!
But how do you look at what the text says and how it says what it says?
I like to think of close reading as a process with two major steps, plus a bonus step if you’re using the process to write a paper.
The first step is to read and observe. These observations would include the “specific textual evidence” the Common Core Standards mention—concrete things you can point to in the text. Direct observations are pretty much the defining element that makes close reading close reading.
Usually, you read the text multiple times to make note of as many observations as possible. And speaking of making notes, close reading usually involves some form of notetaking, which might be annotating in the margins or collecting observations in a notebook or computer file.
The second step is to interpret what you notice. Look for patterns in your observations, and look for places where those patterns break. Look for places in the text that snagged your attention, even if at first you don’t know why. What implicit ideas are embedded in these patterns and anomalies? What is significant about your observations, and what conclusions can you draw from them?
These questions are pretty broad, but you can ask yourself more specific questions based on the particular text you’re analyzing and on the general direction of your observations.
One thing I want to clarify is that steps one and two of this process aren’t necessarily sequential, as in, “I have completed my observations and I will now interpret them.” It’s more likely that you’ll interpret as you observe, and continue to observe as you interpret.
If you’re using close reading to write a paper, the third bonus step is to corral your observations and interpretations into a cohesive argument. This may involve cutting out the observations and interpretations that aren’t relevant, and going back to the text for additional observations you can interpret for the argument you’re developing.
So, what isn’t close reading? It’s not focused just on what happened in the text—the content; that’s summary. It doesn’t speculate on the effect of the text on the reader, which is not something you can directly observe in the text. It typically doesn’t require secondary sources, though you can use close reading with other forms of analysis that do rely on secondary sources. It’s not the discovery of the one “right” answer of what a text means, because there are many ways to observe and interpret a text. But it's also not a free-for-all where any reading of a text is correct because everything is interpretation anyway.
Close reading isn’t the only way to usefully and productively engage with a text. But it is often a useful mode of analysis because it is so grounded in the text, digging deeply into its layers of meaning.
Want to cite this?
MLA Citation: Braun, Clare. "What is Close Reading?" Oregon State Guide to English Literary Terms, 24 Oct. 2022, Oregon State University, liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-close-reading-definition-and-strategies. Accessed [insert date].
