Close reading is reading slowly enough to notice the choices. At this level it is not an activity we sometimes do; it is what every assessment in this course is measuring.
Annotating
Four marks, used consistently, beat a page of highlighter:
| Mark | Means |
|---|---|
? | I do not understand this |
! | This surprised me |
↺ | Connects to something earlier |
✎ | The writing itself is doing something |
Beside ✎, write four words on what it is doing. Those four words are
the seed of a paragraph.
The three passes
- Read for what happens. No pen.
- Read with a pen, using the marks. Slower, and this is the pass that does the work.
- Read only your marks. Two minutes. The pattern they make is your thesis.
What to notice in prose
- A word too strong or too weak for the moment.
- A repeated image — nothing appears three times by accident.
- Where time speeds up or slows down. Four pages on one afternoon means the afternoon is the point.
- What is not said, and by whom.
- Sentence rhythm: a short sentence among long ones is a raised voice.
What to notice in drama
- Who has the long speeches, and when that changes.
- Who interrupts whom.
- Asides and soliloquies: the audience is being told something the other characters are not. Ask why now.
- Stage directions, including the implied ones inside the dialogue.
What to notice in media
- Framing, colour, editing pace, sound, and what is absent. The full list is on Media Forms and Techniques.
From a mark to a paragraph
Mark:
✎ "banished" repeated 11 times in one scene.Paragraph seed: Romeo hears exile as a death sentence and says so eleven times in eighty lines; the repetition is Shakespeare showing a mind that has stopped moving. The Friar’s counter-argument fails not because it is wrong but because Romeo is no longer processing sentences that are not that word.
Curriculum connection
B1.2
select and use appropriate reading comprehension strategies before, during, and after reading to understand texts, including increasingly complex texts (e.g., make jot notes based on teacher prompts during a read-aloud; pose questions about a character’s motivation or actions in a fictional text; role-play alternative solutions to a conflict presented in a text; activate prior knowledge about a topic using an anticipation guide)
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B1.4
make and explain inferences about texts,
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B2.3
identify a variety of elements of style in texts and explain how they help communicate meaning and enhance the effectiveness of the texts (e.g., determine the differences in meaning or effect when the same symbol, such as the sun or water, is used in two different poems; compare the images, symbols, and literary devices used in an Aboriginal myth and a Greek myth; explain how a mythical allusion in a piece of literature or an advertisement enhances the theme or message; determine what effects are achieved in works by two different authors, one of whom uses a variety of sentence types while the other does not)
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B1.8
identify and analyse the perspectives and/or biases evident in texts, including increasingly complex texts, and comment on any questions they may raise about beliefs, values, identity, and power (e.g., determine the fairness of depictions of comic characters in a Shakespeare play, of the antagonist or villain in a novel, of poverty and poor people in a newspaper article)
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B3.3
identify and use a variety of strategies to expand vocabulary (e.g., identify examples of idioms, euphemisms, slang, dialect, acronyms, academic language, and technical terminology and use a variety of resources to check their meaning; review the etymology of unfamiliar words in an etymological dictionary)
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