How do I gather enough material to write a close reading essay?
I always seem to struggle with finding enough information to write a 1500 word close reading essay, and it feels like I stretch my ideas so thin that my essay quality becomes poor.
While only referencing a small section from a prose, how do people have so much to write about in their close reading essays? For example, do people exhaust the 5 Ws and one H, talk about the context of the story and connect it at the end, etc?
(I know StackExchange does not want a question where an entire book could be written about it, so I am asking for the very basic techniques.)
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1 answer
The basic material for a close reading is the text itself. Literally, you read it closely, line by line. Is it clear what is being said? Are there allusions to things outside the text that may affect its interpretations? If so, go look them up and show how the allusion affects the reading of the text. Basically it is just like taking a machine apart to see how it works and then looking up and explicating the mechanical principles embodied in those parts. It is simply about what the text does and how it does it.
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