A lot of the stuff we have learned about close reading, I knew
before. I took AP Lit junior year in
high school and literally every single class period we did close readings of
like every type of genre. It was awful
after the first quarter of school. But
on the bright side, I did learn a lot about close reading passages and how the
author puts in hidden connections throughout the text. I always went into my English classes with
the notion that the author does not plan out every single detail like whether
to put a comma there or to use a certain adjective. After spending so many hours analyzing
literature, I have come to understand that authors do in fact tie everything
together when they write. They chose
certain words to evict a specific emotion or response from the reader. Phrases that seem odd or out of place are
that way for a reason and it is up to the reader to interpret all the other
clues the author has left to get the hidden message. I have learned to not dismiss any random part
of the story because it all makes sense and most of all I have learned that
nothing I think could be considered wrong.
That is the thing I love and hate about English; there are no wrong answers.
As for continuing close reading everything, I still do, even with like TV
commercials. It’s bad. I feel like I can't
even read something without thinking about why the author chose to use this
word instead of another word but I think it actually helps me to understand what
the author is trying to tell the reader.
If I pick up on these small clues, I can have somewhat of a
foreshadowing to what will happen later on in the story and then comprehend the
story a little bit better.
Word Count: 316
Things like this do make me analyze everything, it does ruin watching and reading some things haha
ReplyDeleteI'm really glad that you have been able to spend some quality time with close-readings and literature, even if you feel like your educators have been beating you over the head with the concept.
ReplyDeleteWhile some authors carefully craft their work to illustrate specific themes or ideologies, there is almost always a reading that they never intended on or thought about. For instance, JRR Tolkien denied and resisted that his work Lord of The Rings was an analogy for the great war. However, the reading can still made and is, in fact, there. It's called reader-response theory: based on the readers experience and cultural knowledge they can do all sorts of close-readings that the author had never intended.