Teaching Close Reading

January 25, 2007

Every class I teach could be subtitled: "how to read". The fun of teaching ancient literature is exactly the challenge that its cognitive assumptions and material references pose to the modern reader. Read a modern novel and one is immersed in a world that is largely understood.. and shared.. but step back a few centuries and the opacity of the world rises steeply. The interesting points in such old works arise only as they are read closely..

I had a friend back at Emory who was interested in getting students to read closely.. and his idea was to work through painfully brief sections of text.. in detail. The work he chose for this exercise was the Prelude of William Wordsworth. He made his way through specific passages over multiple class periods, asking the students to re-read the text and to consider aspects of it at length. I always wondered if that was really the best way to get students to read closely?

I should say that one of my tactics is to make sure that every reading assignment is doable. I know from my own experience as a student that the quickest way to invite skimming is to demand too many pages. Whatever time is allotted to reading I want to be spent really reading.. not powering through an absurd number of pages. At the same time reading closely is not a skill one gains by doing it once successfully. It is rather the kind of skill you acquire as your reading experience becomes more diverse and broad. And if this is true, then to spend four weeks of class time on a few pages in Wordsworth is a bad idea..

I connect the skill of reading well to that of writing well. Sure, certain aspects of writing can be taught.. but the most important aspects of writing take something else: practice writing. Perhaps heretically, I doubt the possibility of rapid improvement in a skill like writing. It is a skill too connected to the ways we mentally process the world.. and too dependent on the world of language that exists already in our heads. So how do you learn to write well? Read a lot and write a lot.. and think a lot too. That is the bottom line.

So how does one prod students toward the art of reading closely? Get them to read diverse material. Then model close reading by asking the types of questions that a close reader asks. Why does the author express things in this way? Isn't that quite different than what we would expect? What values are being assumed here? One of the greatest gifts I have acquired from teachers is a cast of mind.. a way of approaching texts.. and this came through listening to their questions.

I don't think writing should be taught by atomizing a single written essay.. by examining all the details and helping students to turn it into a perfect essay. Change those passives into actives! That time is better spent writing something new. In the same way reading should not be a matter of atomizing a paragraph or chapter and pouring over it ceaselessly.. in the way that my friend had his class read and re-read portions of Wordsworth's Prelude. Better to let it go and read something different.. with fresh challenges.