This week’s question is: What is “close reading,” is it important and, if so, how should I teach it? Part One in this series featured responses from Christopher Lehman, Cris Tovani, Pernille Ripp, Jan ...

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 new Common Core State Standards for English have stirred plenty of controversy. In a Vermont classroom full of 8th graders, they are working on a cornerstone of the core: close reading. Many of ...

This week’s question is: What is “close reading,” is it important and, if so, how should I teach it? The term “close reading” appears to be on every English teacher’s lips, though it’s not used in the ...

W hen I was an undergraduate at Amherst College, it was a rite of passage for all English majors to discover that they had entirely misunderstood Robert Frost’s most famous poem “The Road Not Taken” ( ...

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 ...