Close Reading
Close Reading There are those things in life that hardly take any time to become an expert at. Close Reading is not one of those things. Close reading can most simply be defined as the technique of taking a piece of writing piece by piece and hyper-analyzing every little bit of it. The concept may not seem too difficult and complex, however, most of the thinking behind it is metacognition. Metacognition is the word for thinking about the way you think. Both of these concepts are incredibly important when analyzing a finalized work. Metacognition helps the author piece together why they did certain things and chose to make certain choices throughout. Close reading then analyzes the choices the author chose to make as well as how they made the paper more or less effective to the audience. Close reading was first introduced in Inquiry 1. However, it has taken most people until now to fully comprehend the concept in full gear. Throughout the first 3 inquiries, little by little, I have been able to utilize the art of close reading more and more as I’ve been able to understand the concept more fully. Although it may have started out a little shaky in Inquiry 1, by Inquiry 3, my grasp of the concept had become more developed.
My Inquiry 1 paper was about Aimee Bender’s story, The Rememberer. My interpretation of the story was one of the Alzheimer’s disease. I spent the rest of my inquiry advocating for that hypothesis, why that was my hypothesis, and how I could back that argument up. “The Rememberer short story resembles that of the family of an Alzheimer’s victim by making abstract a variety of metaphors surrounding it. Two of the most monumental details that puts this into perspective for the reader are the very first sentence of the poem, ‘My lover is experiencing reverse evolution’ (1) as well as the size of his brain slowly shrinking with every animal he devolved into” (The Rememberer ~ Aimee Bender).
Although this quote may show that I was doing a pretty
My Inquiry 1 paper was about Aimee Bender’s story, The Rememberer. My interpretation of the story was one of the Alzheimer’s disease. I spent the rest of my inquiry advocating for that hypothesis, why that was my hypothesis, and how I could back that argument up. “The Rememberer short story resembles that of the family of an Alzheimer’s victim by making abstract a variety of metaphors surrounding it. Two of the most monumental details that puts this into perspective for the reader are the very first sentence of the poem, ‘My lover is experiencing reverse evolution’ (1) as well as the size of his brain slowly shrinking with every animal he devolved into” (The Rememberer ~ Aimee Bender).
Although this quote may show that I was doing a pretty
Cited: 1. Firouzian, Sean. "Close Reading." Rev. of Inquiry 1. Inquiry 4 (2012). Print. 2. Firouzian, Sean. "Close Reading." Rev. of Inquiry 2. Inquiry 4 (2012). Print. 3. Firouzian, Sean. "Close Reading." Rev. of Inquiry 3. Inquiry 4 (2012). Print.