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Close Reading Guide

Improve comprehension by actively engaging with texts through annotation, summarization, analysis, and contextualization. Enhance critical thinking skills with close reading strategies for better academic success.

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Close Reading Guide

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  1. Close Reading Guide Mrs. Cotton

  2. Why? • Research has shown that students who read deliberately retain more information and retain it longer. • You will read a lot in this class, but most of this information will help you in all of your classes. • If you use these strategies faithfully, you will notice the difference in what you see in a reading, and in the confidence with which you approach your texts.

  3. Annotating • Annotating puts you actively and immediately in a “dialogue” with an author and the issues and ideas you encounter in a written text. • How To: • Highlight if you must, but understand that it is rarely helpful. • The things you’ve highlighted may not be clearly significant to you later on. Pen or pencil will allow you to do more to a text you have to wrestle with. • Mark up the margins of your text with words and phrases. • Obviously, I’m not recommending writing in your novels from the library. This is helpful with AoWs though. For novels, I recommend keeping notes in a notebook and ALWAYS noting page numbers.

  4. How to Annotate Contd. • Ask yourself questions! • “What does this mean?” “Why is the writer drawing that conclusion?” “Why am I being asked to read this text?” etc. These questions will help you remember what you were confused about, and may help you participate in class discussions as well.

  5. Outline, Summarize, and Analyze • Outlining is a form of annotating. It enables you to see the skeleton of a text. • Summarizing is done in paragraph form by explicitly identifying the connections between ideas. • Analyzing is the important step. It adds an evaluative component to the summarizing process - it requires you not just to restate main ideas, but also to test the logic, credibility, and emotional impact of what is said.

  6. Look for Repetitions and Patterns • The way language is chosen, used, and positioned in a text can be an important indication of what an author considers crucial and what he/she expects you to get from his/her writing. Watch for: • Recurring images • Repeated words, phrases, types of examples, or illustrations • Consistent ways of characterizing people, events, or issues

  7. Contextualize • When you’ve finished reading and annotating, take a moment to put what you’ve read into perspective. • Consider the historical and cultural circumstances surrounding the text. • View the reading through the lens of your own experience. Your understanding of the words on the page and their significance is always shapes by what you have come to know and value from living in a particular time and place.

  8. Compare and Contrast • Set course readings against each other to determine their relationships. • Teachers don’t choose what you read at random. Think about why you’ve been asked to consider this text, and how it relates to the other things you’ve studied. • How does it contribute to the main concepts and themes of the course? • How has your thinking been altered by this reading?

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