Pattern Recognition

Fri, Sep 01

When you do “close reading,” you observe facts and details about the text. You may focus on a particular passage, or look at the text as a whole. Your aim may be to notice striking features of the text, including rhetorical features, structural elements, cultural references; or, your aim may be to notice selected features—for instance, oppositions and correspondences, or particular historical references. Either way, making these observations constitutes the first step in the process of close reading.

The second step is looking for patterns in the things you've noticed: repetitions, contradictions, similarities. Notice how long or short the sentences are, what order they come in, how nouns, pronouns, verbs, and adjectives are used. What images or phrases repeat or echo each other? Notice the punctuation. Look for omissions, gaps, disjunctions in the text. What does the text not talk about? What is the text hiding or leaving out?

The third step is interpreting your observations. What we're basically talking about here is inductive reasoning: moving from the observation of particular facts and details to a conclusion, or interpretation, based on those observations. And, as with inductive reasoning, close reading requires careful gathering of data (your observations) and careful thinking about what these data add up to.

The most important thing with close reading is to pay attention to the text. All arguments ultimately go back to the text: what’s there, what’s not there, what is implied by what’s there or not there, and how we understand what’s there.