Close reading, which is a thoughtful, critical analysis of a text with a goal of developing a deep understanding of the text's form and meaning, is important when reading any academic text as well as when reading things such as new articles or novels. Close reading is important because it helps the reader better understand and retain the information from the text. This is especially useful when reading things like textbooks where it is crucial to fully understand everything that was mentioned in the text. The strategy that I personally use when close reading is the SQ3R strategy, this includes Survey, Question, Read, Recite, and Review. I naturally find myself surveying articles and textbook chapters before I read them in order to pick out the most crucial information so this strategy works very well for me. I think it is very important to have an idea of what your going to read before you read it as well as to ask yourself questions about what you just read after you finish. The absolute best way to retain information and understand a text is ask yourself questions and summarize what you just read. Close reading is extremely important when annotating and vice versa, annotating is great way to fully understand a text. An example of an annotation that I did from "A Modest Proposal" from this unit can be seen below,
Though we as readers can get the sense that
this is a satirical piece of writing from the very beginning, all doubt is
removed when in the 9th paragraph, Swift begins talking about how
the young children make great food and goes into detail about how to cook them
and continues this in the paragraphs that follow.
I numbered all of the paragraphs before I began so I could go back and pick out important information more easily. By then reading closely, I identified when the writing took a strong satirical tone.
