close reading

 Close reading to me is looking at a text under a microscope. A lot of the reading that I do in college is more of a quick speed read with a quick skim. I usually never take the time to look deep into my reading. Close reading is truly dissecting your text and looking at it at all angles. There are many ways to close read and some do it better then others. The best thing about close reading is that anyone can do it. Annotating a text by going through the text and underlining grey areas or other areas that stand out to you can be very beneficial. By underlining the text it allows you to go back and observe the text. If you have a question about a authors purpose of a certain portion of a text, no matter the readers level, you can go back and ask questions and look at it from different points of view. Another good thing about close reading is that you can incorporate it into your speed reading or skimming. As your cruising through a reading skipping over chapters you can still mark or highlight things that stick out to you, allowing you to go back and look at them later. Close reading is something that I was taught in my high school English classes but I didn’t even realize I was doing it. I never really put a name on it. We would be assigned to read outside of class as homework and would be assigned quizzes weekly based on our reading. As we would read we would sit down and discuss the reading like as if we were our own little book club. In these discussions we would annotate the text assignment after assignment. We would break the text down into little pieces and using everyone’s own different perspective on the reading would piece it together. Close reading is a great way to understand a text and is a great way to approach any problem that you may come across.