The Golden Rule of Close Reading

This week's #engsschat on Twitter focused on close reading, and it was fascinating to see how different educators interpret and use close reading skills in their classrooms.  Everyone agreed that close reading skills are important to teach and learn, but we each have our own ideas and questions about how to integrate close reading effectively and meaningfully into our day-to-day work with our students.

For me, close reading is all about becoming more conscious of how language informs meaning.  When I read something closely, I'm looking at what specific words, phrases, or more generally, choices, an author makes to elicit a response from me.  How exactly is Jefferson able to make me as angry as he is in the initial draft of the Declaration of Independence?  What does Poe mean, exactly, when he says in "The Fall of the House of Usher" that "Lady Madeline was no more"?   How does Morrison try to make me feel the generations-long struggle to overcome the legacy of slavery in Beloved?  Where do those emotional or intellectual reactions come from, and what buttons is an author trying to push to lead me to a particular range of experiences with the text?

Some folks registered concern that too much close reading can be off-putting, or that close reading without sufficient background context or scaffolding can be challenging.  I suppose that's true, but I can't help but think that if we need a bunch of context to find or make meaning of a text, then something's amiss.  Context is always helpful, but it shouldn't be required for a communication to be effective.

One of the prompts for the discussion asked if we lose something by investing solely on evidence-based reading--if we spend too much time figuring out where in the text we found our conclusions/responses, have we missed out on the magic of a text?

Maybe, but I propose that all reading, on some level, should be close, evidence-based reading.  Too often we passively allow what we experience to wash over us,  often with the noble thought that we'll go back and consider it more carefully when we have time and space to devote to it.   Unfortunately, we don't spend enough time thinking about why we think what we think, or what inspires us to feel. Instead, all too often we have knee-jerk reactions that, often because of time and bandwidth constraints, end up becoming our not-so-well-reasoned opinions.  

Reading, at its core, should always be an active engagement with another voice trying to communicate with me.  If I don't read closely, I'm just letting the words bounce off me--it's a one-sided interaction that more often than not doesn't stick.

When I tell my students to "read like a writer," what I'm really telling them is to use The Golden Rule.  Treat writers the way you want your writing to be treated.   I owe it to the writer to at least consider how and why she's trying to connect with me. After all, isn't that what I want my readers to do for me?