Close Reading as the Route to Originality: Close reading is the foundation of academic writing because the purpose of academic writing is to make an original contribution to a field of knowledge. Close reading is the way in which something new is discovered about a text.

Process and Product: When we use the term “close reading” – as in, “Do a close reading of Hamlet” – we usually mean it in two different but related senses: (1) the act (a process) of carefully analyzing a text, and (2) an argumentative paper (a product) based on that careful analysis.

Close Reading and Textuality: As a product, a close reading is a relatively short paper that advances an argument about a relatively small aspect of a text. That “small aspect” could be a brief passage or a specific theme or a certain pattern, but it is not the entire text. It would be impossible to do a close reading of, say, Shakespeare’s The Tempest or Abraham Lincoln’s assassination or police brutality or post-traumatic stress disorder. Each of those topics is much too big for a short close reading, the aim of which is detailed analysis and a tight argument about a specific aspect of a text, event, idea, or phenomenon. The only way in which to accomplish those goals is to scale back the amount of the text that you’re attempting to interpret. Promise less and deliver more.

Beyond Common Sense: As a process, a “close reading” isn’t just a “reading” – i.e., an interpretation of a text. A close reading is an interpretation that focuses on what is not obvious, on what requires “close” as opposed to “surface” attention. A close reading – especially a close reading of a well-known text – requires you to deal imaginatively, even playfully with the text in search of a quirk, detail, or line of questioning that can generate some new insight on the text.

Specificity in Close Reading: This reading is “close” because it revels in details, in the small quirks and oddities of a text as opposed to its major themes. A paper about love in Romeo and Juliet or ambition in Macbeth is not a close reading. A paper about Shakespeare’s decision to write the first fourteen lines of dialog between Romeo and Juliet in the form of a sonnet and the way that this invocation of the sonnet tradition foreshadows the tragic end of this young love – now that’s a close reading.

The Part for the Whole: A close reading does not forget about or ignore the major themes of a text. The very best close readings draw our attention to and interpret some detail or idiosyncrasy as a way to reframe or reinterpret the major themes and conventional readings of a text. In other words, a close reading has an argument that is about a relatively small aspect of a text, but what’s at stake in that argument extends the idea into the more central concerns and features of that text and/or the tradition to which that text belongs. Thus, a close reading looks at something small in a text as a way to say something new about something big in or around that text. 

Defining a Text in Close Reading: For example, in a close reading your “text” (the thing you’re interpreting) wouldn’t be “Shakespeare’s Hamlet.” Your text would be some aspect, issue, problem, theme, etc. in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Your consideration of this aspect of the text would be grounded in a close reading of one key line, passage, or scene, but your close reading would extend out from that passage to consider some bigger implications.

Close Reading Beyond Literary Studies: Close reading is a practice usually associated with literary studies, but the methods and concerns of literary studies can be mobilized for the interpretation of things that aren’t literature. You can do close readings of historical events and social phenomena. You can even do close readings of quantitative data. For example, let’s say you have some data showing that arrests in New York City have steadily decreased over the past three months. A surface reading might assume that crime has gone down, but a close reading could reveal that police have not been making arrests as a way to protest the mayor’s lack of support for the police; crime has not gone down, only arrests, which – if that fact is know by criminals – might mean that crime has gone up even as, and specifically because, arrests have gone down. 

Evidence and Analysis in Close Reading: As in this last example, close reading is all about the way that evidence doesn’t interpret itself. Evidence needs analysis. And evidence can sometimes seem to support one position while the careful analysis of that evidence reveals a different position to be true. In other words, close reading is all about the potential difference between facts and truth, between information and knowledge.

No Outside Sources*: When doing a close reading, outside sources should not be consulted. In contrast to a research paper, which can be filled with dozens of sources, there is a virtue in not using sources in a close reading, especially internet sources such as Sparknotes and Wikipedia. On the one hand, it is important to understand that these sources do not give the interpretation of a text but an interpretation and sometimes a bad interpretation. On the other hand, relying upon these sources is inimical to academic writing, the point of which is to say something new – not to be “right” when your ideas are compared with your professor’s ideas or published scholarship, but to add something new to an ongoing academic conversation. If you rely too heavily on outside sources, whether from the internet or the library, your writing will be derivative. You will find yourself reduced to agreeing and disagreeing with the ideas of others as opposed to generating an original idea of your own.

No Criticism: Just as you should avoid “lowest common denominator” ideas available on the internet, don’t start with (or refer to) “scholars” in a close reading. In a close reading, it is absurd to say something like, “Most scholar’s believe that Hamlet’s fatal flaw is indecision,” because such a statement makes a claim to have read all of the scholarship on Hamlet and to have deciphered the dominant critical paradigm, which is probably not something you have done in your lifetime and which is, in any case, the kind of claim that belongs in a research paper, not in a close reading.

Common Knowledge: While a close reading shouldn’t involve research on the internet or in the library, it can make reference to “common knowledge.” While the definition of “common knowledge” will vary from discipline to discipline and even professor to professor, you can sometimes think of “common knowledge” as the things you learned in high school. Common knowledge is information that is generally known to an educated person.

Questions that the Text Can Answer: Thus, for a close reading, restrict yourself to your text. Don’t search for answers in criticism. Don’t search for answers in history. Certainly don’t search for answers on the internet. Ask questions that can be answered with reference to the text itself, and refer only to the text when responding to those questions and problems.

Here are some possible approaches or strategies for close readings:

• Contrast or complicate a “surface reading” with a “close reading.” 
• Select a key passage that isn’t obvious, one that isn’t famous – e.g., not Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” speech, but the completely bizarre and boring exchange between Polonius and Reynaldo in Act II, Scene i of Hamlet – and show how it works within or comments upon or changes our understanding of the larger text.
• Alternately, select a passage that is famous and produce a reading that isn’t obvious, a reading which has the potential to change a surface understanding of that passage and that text. 
• In any event, be unusual. Give your reader a new way of looking at something he or she thought he or she was familiar with.
• Offer a close reading that is only available due to your own situation and experiences in the world. This is not to say that you should write a “personal essay” that shows how we might learn some “life lesson” from a text. Instead, write an analytical essay that interprets the meaning of the text using your own experiences, identities, attitudes, and beliefs as a prompt for insight. 
• Offer an outsider’s perspective. Don’t worry about or hide the fact that you may be a newcomer to a text, an author, or a tradition. Instead, think of this unfamiliarity as an opportunity. Someone who is previously acquainted with a text, author, or tradition is likely to reiterate the conventional questions and arguments about, say, a text like Hamlet. Someone who has never read or studied Hamlet, however, has no assumptions about what the text is “supposed” to mean, no assumptions about what he or she is “supposed” to be looking for. In other words, someone unfamiliar with a text has an opportunity to interpret it from the ground up, while someone familiar with that text might be restricted, whether consciously or not, to the standard and conventional concerns with that text. The very purpose of a close reading is to offer a non-standard or unconventional perspective, so embrace your outsider’s perspective and generate a reading that makes sense of a text on its own terms, not in the ways that have been sanctioned by previous critics or teachers. 
• Generate a theory. Looking at one specific example (e.g. a poem or a historical event), and your analysis of it, propose (and provide a name for) an abstract theory that might explain other similar phenomena.

Here’s what not to do in a close reading:

• Summarize a plot. You should assume your reader has read and is familiar with your text, whether that text is a book, event, or idea. You don’t need to include large chunks of plot summary. Instead, you should include small bits of orientation that remind your reader what happens in a text and helps that reader locate him or herself in it. In other words, you can assume that your reader has read your text, but not recently.
• Reiterate a point that you or your teacher made about a text in high school, not only because this is an unoriginal idea (which it is), but also because that kind of point is likely to be just the kind of “surface reading” that you’re meant to deepen or complicate in a “close reading.” This is not to say that you should ignore or avoid previous knowledge about a text (something which, in any event, it would be impossible to do). But you should use that previous knowledge as the basis for a new question, not as the basis for an argument that you want to make.