Specific aspects, and a method for close reading
Reading a text you have never seen
- Close reading means building an interpretation of a text from the text alone. Nothing can be prepared in advance except the procedure.
- Two things carry it: knowing what counts as a specific aspect of a written text, and having a method that splits an unfamiliar text into readable passes.
- Prose, poetry and non-fiction all take the same method. What changes is where the pattern usually hides.
What counts as a "specific aspect of written texts"
- It is not two quotations and not two paragraphs. Aspects come from four families: purposes and audiences; ideas (character, theme, setting); language features (figurative language, syntax, style, symbolism, vocabulary, sound devices); and structures (beginnings and endings, narrative sequence, part text against whole).
- The word specific is load-bearing. Language features is a family, not an aspect. Syntax is an aspect, and so is the shift from past tense to present. If you cannot point at it with a finger, it is a family, not an aspect.
- Take your two from different families. Imagery and symbolism are frequently the same observation twice, and that counts as one aspect; a language feature plus a structural feature cannot collapse. Name the aspect in the paragraph's opening sentence — the governing aspect here is syntax takes four words and makes the count checkable by a reader reading fast.
- Give each aspect its own evidence and its own judgement. Two aspects sharing one piece of evidence is one aspect wearing two names.
The six-step method
- You cannot prepare the text, so prepare the procedure. Use the same one in practice, so it runs without decisions on the day.
- 1. Read once for sense, with no pen, and note your reaction in three or four words — the fastest route to a point that is yours.
- 2. Read again for the focus you are analysing towards, and let it decide what is worth marking.
- 3. Annotate in passes, one channel at a time — words (diction, register, odd vocabulary), syntax (sentence length, active or passive), structure (where it begins, ends and turns; what is withheld), voice (who speaks, at what distance). A single pass looking for everything finds only what announces itself.
- 4. Find the pattern. Anything appearing three times is deliberate, and the place a pattern breaks is usually the best paragraph available.
- 5. Decide your reading in one arguable sentence, in writing. This poem is about grief is a topic; the poem withholds the death entirely and puts its grief into an unfinished sentence is a reading.
- 6. Write, judging as you go — point, evidence, analysis, judgement, link.
Worked Example
Treat the poem below as a text you have never seen before. The method is run on it from a cold start.
Shed
My father built it the year the road came through,
out of what the road left: two doors,
a window with the wrong catch,
boards that had been a fence and remembered it.Nothing in there was bought.
Nothing in there was thrown away.
The jars along the shelf were labelled
in a hand that got smaller each year, as if
the words were being asked to take up less room.I have the key. I have had the key
for eleven months. The catch is still wrong.
Somebody should go up and see to the roof
before the winter. Somebody should.
The question asks: Discuss how the poet conveys the speaker's response to loss, referring to at least TWO specific aspects.
0:00–2:00 — read for sense, then for the question. A shed built by a father; the father is gone; the speaker has not gone in. Reaction: the last line felt like a sentence being abandoned. The focus is response to loss, and the poem never says loss. That gap is the answer.
2:00–5:00 — the passes.
- Words. Nothing twice, Somebody twice, wrong twice — the second time the same catch, eleven months later.
- Syntax. Somebody should. is the only sentence missing its verb phrase — it has been cut off.
- Structure and voice. The poem opens with My father built — a named person, a completed action — and closes with Somebody should — no person, no action. The speaker never says died, miss or sad.
5:00–6:30 — the pattern, then the reading. Three repetitions, each with a difference, and the second instance always adds duration or subtracts something. So: the poem conveys loss by refusing to name it and recording the speaker's inaction instead, so grief is measured in elapsed time and in a sentence that cannot be finished.
Two aspects, two families, named: repetition with variation and the movement from a named agent to no agent. The judgement: the technique works because the poem's only stated fact about the speaker — eleven months with the key — is arithmetic rather than feeling, and arithmetic is what a person reaches for when they are counting instead of grieving.
Read, pass, pattern, one sentence, write.