ENG140Y1/Unit 1

Unit 1 · Literature for our Time

Close Reading

The skill everything else rests on. Close reading is not reading slowly — it is noticing particular words and asking what work they are doing. Every essay in this course is a claim about that work, supported by the words themselves.

By the end you can

• Notice specific features rather than general impressions.
• Turn a noticing into a claim about effect.
• Write a close-reading paragraph with claim, quotation and analysis.
• Tell analysis apart from summary and from paraphrase.

Why it matters & where it comes from

Why it exists

Anyone can say what a text is about. The discipline is in showing how it produces its effects, and that requires evidence at the level of the sentence. Without it, one opinion is as good as another.

In the real world

The same skill reads a contract, a policy document or a political speech: what is this text doing, what is it not saying, whose interests does its framing serve? It is the most transferable thing an English degree teaches.

Story & open questions

Close reading was formalised in the 1920s by I. A. Richards, who gave students poems with the authors' names removed and found the responses dismaying. The method became dominant, and later critics argued it cut texts off from history — a tension Unit 7 returns to.

What "noticing" means

Rule Specific, not general

A general reaction is not yet a noticing. Compare:

General: "The tone is sad." True perhaps, but there is nothing to build on.

Specific: "Every verb in the second stanza is passive." Now there is something to explain.

The test: could you point at the page? If not, keep looking.

Example Things worth noticing

Repetition. A word that appears three times in twelve lines is doing something.

Odd word choice. Where a simpler word would have served, ask why this one.

Shifts. Tense changing, a pronoun moving from "we" to "I", a sentence suddenly short.

Absence. No adjectives at all; no names; no question ever answered.

Contradiction. A speaker who claims calm in increasingly broken sentences.

Noticing is not yet analysis

"The poem repeats the word 'still' four times" is an observation, and on its own it earns nothing. The analysis is what the repetition does: whether it steadies the poem or wears the word out, and how the meaning shifts between the first use and the last.

The close-reading paragraph

Rule Three moves, in order

Claim. A sentence saying what the passage does. Arguable, specific.

Quotation. The words that show it. Short — a phrase, rarely a whole sentence.

Analysis. Two or three sentences explaining how the quoted words produce the effect. This is the part that is marked, and the part most often left out.

Example A worked paragraph

Working from an invented line, so the method is visible without a set text: "The house stood. The garden stood. Nothing moved but the light."

Claim: The passage makes stillness feel like strain rather than peace.

Quotation: the repeated "stood", and "Nothing moved but the light".

Analysis: "Stood" is an odd verb for a house — houses do not usually do anything, so the verb gives them a posture, as of something holding itself upright. Repeating it across two short sentences makes the effort audible. Then "Nothing moved" seems to confirm the calm, but the exception that follows undercuts it: the light is moving, so time is passing after all, and the stillness is something being maintained rather than something that simply is.

Notice the analysis is longer than the quotation. That ratio is right.

The three failure modes

Summary. Retelling what happens. The marker has read the text.

Paraphrase. Saying the same thing in worse words. "The poet is saying that the house was very still" adds nothing.

Assertion. Claiming an effect without showing its source. "This creates a haunting atmosphere" — from what?

From paragraph to essay

Rule An essay is close readings under an argument

Each body paragraph is a close reading. The thesis is the claim they together support, and each paragraph must earn its place by advancing it.

If a paragraph could be deleted without weakening the thesis, delete it.

If two paragraphs make the same point about different passages, merge them or find the difference.

Example Building up

Notice: three separate passages all describe the sea in terms of machinery.

Claim about each: what that metaphor does in that passage.

Thesis: what the pattern amounts to across the text — perhaps that the novel makes nature legible only through industry, and cannot describe the sea except in the vocabulary it distrusts.

The pattern was found by close reading. The essay is the argument the pattern supports. Unit 9 develops this properly.

Common pitfalls

• Writing about the author's intentions. You cannot know them; write about what the text does.
• Long quotations doing the work the analysis should do.
• Listing devices — "there is alliteration here" — without saying to what end.
• Beginning with a general claim about the human condition. Begin with the text.
• Treating your first reading as final. The second reading finds what the first missed.

Practice

Work each fully before opening the answer. These use invented lines so the method is visible without depending on a particular set text.

Practice 1 · Specific or general

Which is a usable noticing? (a) "The mood is tense." (b) "There are no full stops in the last stanza."

Answer

(b). It can be pointed at and it demands explanation. (a) is a conclusion with no evidence attached yet — though (b) might well be how you would argue for it.

Practice 2 · Find the claim

Turn this noticing into a claim: "The speaker calls the town 'it' for nine lines and 'she' in the tenth."

Answer

Something like: the shift to "she" turns the town from a place into a person at the exact moment the speaker admits attachment, so the pronoun does the emotional work the speaker will not say outright.

Practice 3 · Diagnose

What is wrong with: "The imagery of darkness creates a sombre mood"?

Answer

Assertion without evidence or mechanism. Which images? Why sombre rather than restful or concealing? The sentence names a device and a mood and skips everything in between.

Practice 4 · Ratio

Your paragraph is a two-line quotation and one line of comment. What is the problem?

Answer

The quotation is doing the work. Shorten it to the phrase that matters and expand the analysis — it should be the longest part.

Practice 5 · Write one

Write a close-reading paragraph on: "He said he was fine. He said it again. He said it to the window."

Solution

A workable claim: the repetition converts a reassurance into evidence against itself. "He said he was fine" is unremarkable once; repeated, it becomes something being insisted on. The third repetition changes the listener from a person to a window, which withdraws the audience entirely — by the end he is not reassuring anyone, and the identical words have travelled from statement to symptom without changing at all. Note the analysis never claims to know how he feels; it stays with what the sentences do.

Practice 6 · Absence

A story never names its narrator. What might you argue?

Answer

Depends on the text, but the reasoning is the same: what does the withholding do? It might universalise the narrator, or suggest a self not fully formed, or refuse the reader an intimacy the narrator refuses everyone. Argue for one and show where the text supports it.

Practice 7 · Intention

Why avoid "the author wants us to feel"?

Answer

Because it is unknowable and unnecessary. The text's effects are on the page and can be demonstrated; the author's state of mind cannot. Write "the passage produces" rather than "the author intends".

Practice 8 · The second reading

What should a second reading look for that the first did not?

Answer

Pattern. The first reading follows the sense; the second sees repetition, structure and shape, because you already know where it is going. Most essays come out of the second reading.

Expanded topic checklist

Course coverage. This unit underpins the whole of ENG140Y1. It should cover the following before you move on:

• Noticing. Specific textual features rather than general impressions.
• The paragraph. Claim, quotation, analysis, in that order and that proportion.
• What is not analysis. Summary, paraphrase, unsupported assertion.
• Scaling up. How close readings assemble into an argument.

Textbook/source alignment

The calendar does not name texts or methods, but close reading is the basis of assessment in every first-year English course. Check Quercus for the reading list, the essay topics and the required citation style.

Core idea map

Notice something specific, claim what it does, show it from the words, explain the mechanism. Units 2 to 6 supply the vocabulary for each genre; Units 9 and 10 turn the paragraphs into essays.

Study routine. One close-reading paragraph a week on any passage, all year. It costs twenty minutes and is the only practice that reliably improves the essays.

Deep practice extensions

Use these after the main practice set. They test whether the distinctions have actually landed.

Extension 1 · The test

How do you know a noticing is specific enough?

Guide

You can point at the words on the page. If you cannot, it is a reaction, not yet an observation.

Extension 2 · Proportion

Which part of a close-reading paragraph should be longest?

Guide

The analysis. The quotation should be as short as it can be while still showing what you claim.

Extension 3 · Summary versus analysis

What separates them?

Guide

Summary says what happens; analysis says how the writing produces an effect. If the marker learns nothing they could not get from reading the text, it is summary.

Extension 4 · Intention

What replaces "the author wants"?

Guide

"The text does" or "the passage produces". Keep the claim about the words, where evidence is available.

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