Close reading: passes, and the shape of a paragraph

Reading a text you have never seen

• Close reading means working out how a text achieves its effect from the text alone — no background, no prepared material, nothing but the words in front of you.
• The three text types are prose, poetry and non-fiction. Each rewards a different first look, but the method underneath is the same.
• Three things make an unfamiliar text tractable: a focus to read for, a method that splits the reading into passes, and a paragraph shape that turns an observation into analysis.

Finding the focus first

• Take the focus — the thing you are analysing towards — before you read the text. Reading cold means you notice whatever is loudest rather than what matters.

• The focus is a constraint, not a suggestion. Excellent analysis of something else is analysis of something else.
• Read the focus word by word. Lost, not changed, implies value — so the text must establish the thing mattered before it went.

Reading in passes

• Give each pass one job. Doing all four at once is why unfamiliar texts feel impossible.
  • Pass one — no pen. Read for sense, then note your reaction in three or four words: uneasy, sad but not sentimental, being told off. Your reaction is evidence about the text's effect, and this is the only time you will read it without knowing what happens.
  • Pass two — words. Connotations, unusual choices, small qualifiers.
  • Pass three — syntax and structure. Sentence lengths, where they change, where paragraphs or stanzas break, first and last sentences.
  • Pass four — voice and what is withheld. Who narrates, what they know, what tense, what they never say.
• Then decide your reading in one sentence before you write: this text does X by doing Y. Every paragraph then has something to be part of, and you can see which observations do not belong.

The paragraph shape

• Open with the claim, not the quotation. A paragraph beginning with copied text makes your reader wait to find out why they are reading it.
• Every paragraph must end on the focus. If it could be moved unchanged into an answer about a different focus, it is not yet answering this question.
• Some of the best evidence has no quotation marks available. It still counts if you point at it precisely — the father is given no dialogue; this is the last sentence of the poem.
• If a paragraph has to be shortened, cut examples, never the mechanism and the consequence — those two are the analysis, and everything else is illustration.