Iwas an English major in college, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t understand why I should pay to study literature when I knew how to read and could do so more happily on my own time. Like many others, ...

The Common Core State Standards have placed more emphasis on the close reading of all texts, and have made a point of increasing the use of nonfiction in secondary English classrooms. In this article, ...

If you have not been assigned a passage or poem, then you must select a text and a specific passage. Limit your selection to a paragraph or two at the most. In some cases, a sentence or two (or a few ...

The invention of close reading. By transforming quotations into evidence, close reading served as way to turn postwar criticism into a specialized knowledge. But what if we treated it more as an art ...

Guillory (Professing Criticism), an English professor at New York University, serves up an esoteric examination of what it means to give a text a “close reading.” He notes that from the 1600s through ...