Help me study for my English class. I’m stuck and don’t understand.
The Close Reading is a one-page, single-spaced mini-essay about any of the assigned PRIMARY sources we’ve read in this course up to the point of the due date.
There will be two close reading assignments in this class for 10% of the grade each (a total of 20% of the grade for both). The close readings are one-page, single-spaced mini-essays.
You can develop the mini-essays from your discussion posts, if you want. Each discussion board prompt should be regarded as a possible essay prompt for writing a close reading. You should definitely write about something that interests you, and you should feel free to use an old discussion post to get started. I’m attaching, below, a few documents and links that should help you.
First, here is an example of a close reading that a Troy University student wrote. I’m putting it here as an attachment. If you have trouble looking at this or printing it out, please send me an email and I can send them directly to you as .pdf files, (Please make sure you indicate clearly which documents you need; my email address is jlwhatley@troy.edu.)
Make yours look like this.
Okay, so what is a close reading? Googling the term “close reading” could help, but be aware that what you’ll find isn’t the same as my assignment but rather explanations of a term used in literary criticism.
Basically, a close reading is a focused argument about some very particular feature of a text – a single character, a single setting, a single plot element, a single recurring theme, etc. – in support of a specific, arguable, literary thesis about that particular feature of the text; this thesis usually appears at the end of the first paragraph.
Assume that your reader has read the work you’re discussing, but you’ll still need to give them guideposts to the exact episode or feature of the work you’re discussing; assume they’ve read the book but don’t have it open in front of them and, more importantly, haven’t spent as much time reading it carefully as you have.
Here are a couple of links that may be helpful. First, here’s a list of General Questions (from Ann Charters’s anthology “The Story”). You can print this out and use the questions listed on the two pages to help you come up with ideas about the work you want to write about. (Sorry about the poor quality of the scan. Before this term is over, I intend to type out these documents so that I’ll have a better digital copy to share with you.)
