The Language of Composition - Ch. 2

Close Reading: The Art and Craft of Analysis

• Close Reading
• Analysis of text
• When you read closely, you develop an understudying of a text that is based first on the words  themselves and then on larger the ideas those words suggest
• You can analyze a passage through the rhetorical triangle
• Analyzing Style
• Tone, sentence structure, and vocabulary make up the style
• Choice of words : Diction
• Trope : Artful diction
• Talking with the text
• Pay attention to the choices the writer makes in the way he or she connects subject, speaker, and audience
• Remember that style is a subset or rhetoric, it is a means of persuasion
• Annotation
• Requires reading with a pen or pencil in hand
• Identify main ideas, topic sentences, thesis statements
• Dialectical Journals
• Use columns to represent visually the conversation between the text and the reader
• Break text into small sections to notice details
• Graphic Organizer
• Use the paragraph division in the text as natural breaking points, or perhaps consider smaller sections that reveal interesting stylistic choices
• Analyzing a Visual Text
• Many of the same tools of rhetorical analysis and close reading are also useful for detecting the underlying message in visual text.
• From Analysis to Essay: Writing about Close Reading
• We have to reach the deeper understanding when we write about rhetoric and style, or we will end up merely summarizing rather then analyzing the strategies a writer uses to achieve a particular purpose
• 
  
• 
  

• 
  
•