Chapter 1: Time is on Your Side
Reading Slowly
In these early stages of a close reading, it is not necessary to find an analytical angle right away or to identify immediately the author’s overall purpose. At the beginning of your close reading, your greatest asset is time; therefore, you should slow down. Analyzing a text is a multi-stage process and finding evidence from a text is the very beginning of that process. The tools we introduce in this chapter will not help you if you do not give yourself the time needed to apply them properly.
By the end of the chapter you will be asked to write a brief paragraph wherein you reconstruct what you’ve identified as the author’s complex argument, but at this early stage of the chapter, we need to gather evidence with which we can begin that reconstruction.
You should not jump immediately to your thesis; instead, you need to gather complex evidence by reading slowly with a pen in hand. You should take this time to annotate the text you are reading with your observations and initial interpretations.
For now, it is enough to annotate what you are reading—make a note of things that are interesting, confusing, or repeated. When your task is to analyze a text, resist the need to jump in and begin drafting your thesis right away. Instead, to ensure you will eventually make an argument of adequate complexity, you should devote the time necessary to examine the text thoroughly.
To examine a text closely, you should:
- Annotate your experience
- Take notice
- Be granular
1. Annotate your experience
You will always begin by reading with a pen in hand, writing in the margins, underlining, highlighting and otherwise marking on the text, if you own the text, or by taking notes on a separate piece of paper if you are borrowing the text. You can draw arrows in the margins to link different parts of the text as a way of following the author’s logic and argument. If you are reading online, you should get in the habit of annotating your reading experience in some way. You can do this on paper, or with a digital text editor or PDF editor which allow you to highlight and make notes or comments. Hypothes.is is a free general purpose web and PDF annotator that you can use for that purpose.
2. Take notice
During your first reading of a text, you should be looking for elements that jump out at you, that you think are interesting or puzzling, or that you think may need more attention in a second reading. Underline or highlight words you do not understand, then seek out definitions for those words. If you encounter a word that is new to you, it is likely that the word is significant to the central message or theme of the text.
3. Be granular
Reading critically requires being granular. It is not enough to just flag whole sentences or even whole paragraphs. You must get down to the level of the word. Begin by looking for some straightforward clues:
a. What’s interesting? What’s strange?
What words and phrases catch your attention in