to share information, to understand job responsibilities, and so on. But to go beyond these mundane responses we must ask the question, “Why should we read?” Susan Wise Bauer (2003), in her book The Well-Educated Mind, begins her chapter on the art of reading with the claim that most futurists believe and have declared:
We are a postliterate culture. Books are outdated forms of communication. Soon the flood of information that is now contained in books, magazines, and newspapers will be sorted by artificial intelligence and presented in multimedia formats. No more boring print. (p. 24)
Bauer (2003) goes on to explain that there is still a role for print in the world, but changes since the publication of her book suggest the futurists’ vision of the new nonprint world may be closer than she imagined. Anyone who has spent more than a few weeks in a 21st century secondary school classroom will agree that students today don’t read as much as those of prior generations.
Why should we read? When we return to that question, the real answer has less to do with pragmatic necessity in our now primarily digital lives and more to do with what reading print material does to us. The act of reading the printed word (more than just reading the words for surface meaning) is the process of taking words and unpacking their ideas and deeper meanings. Reading is an intentional action that helps create and influence our view of ourselves as thinking beings with values that are cultural, social, and even political and theological.
In a world of digital interactivity, students grow up expecting to engage with every experience by allowing the experience to engage them. This is fundamentally passive. Interactive video games and other digital media do the work of engaging users. Books, on the other hand, require readers to do the work, using their intellect and imagination to fully experience the text. When students are accustomed to digital media, they may bring those expectations to printed texts, and their reading experiences suffer as a result.
For some educators, the conventional wisdom is to adjust their instruction to meet students’ expectations of passive engagement. However, this does students a disservice. At some point, students need to experience the joy of actively engaging in a great essay or novel. At some point, they need to be able to read more than the story, more than the words on the page, more than for the simple quiz on the chapter. They need to bring themselves to the text. As one of my graduate professors often said, “Your reading of a text is only as good as the questions you ask. And if you ask no questions of the text, it will yield no answers” (B. Mudge, personal communication, September 5, 1997). Students need to know what questions to ask and how to answer them.
The standards movement has precipitated a stronger emphasis on the ability to read, analyze, and report on challenging texts, both literary and informational (Student Achievement Partners, 2016). As the standards movement developed, the emphasis on informational text developed with it (Kendall, 2011). English language arts teachers found themselves in a position of having to add the study of informational texts more often into their curricula. Social studies teachers had taught informational texts for years, but they found an increased emphasis on the analysis of primary sources, which often challenge students with difficult ideas and unfamiliar styles.
Standards in English language arts (and to a lesser extent in social studies) often depict a sharp division between literary and informational texts. A closer examination, however, reveals an enormous degree of overlap in the skills needed to address these two kinds of texts. Consider these two eighth-grade Common Core Reading standards, one for informational texts and one for literary texts:
RI.8.2: Determine a central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including its relationship to supporting ideas; provide an objective summary of the text. (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers [NGA & CCSSO], 2010)
RL.8.2: Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including its relationship to the characters, setting, and plot; provide an objective summary of the text. (NGA & CCSSO, 2010)
While a few terms differ, these two standards represent the same skill set. We might wonder why there are multiple separate standards that address the same skills. One answer is that the authors of these standards wanted to send a strong message about the importance of teaching the analysis of informational text, a genre that has traditionally held a lesser place in the English language arts curriculum (Kendall, 2011). In making this judgment, the creators of the state standards were correct. The ability to understand and analyze informational text is a basic skill every student must master. Students who go on to higher education will clearly spend the majority of their reading on informational texts, and if one considers the reading one does in daily life, be it for leisure or career, most is informational text. It is a basic life skill.
Secondary teachers of English, social studies, and the wide range of content areas that access state or Common Core English language arts standards must develop students’ abilities to read critically and analyze an informational or literary text. These standards are challenging, and teachers face the limitations of time and student interest as they accept this challenge. It may well be that teachers sometimes choose to provide teacher-led analysis of a text as a method of saving time in a crowded curriculum. After all, they may reason, teacher-led analysis is better than no analysis at all. While that may be true, it does not lead students to develop their abilities to read and analyze a text independently, as required by the standards. That means we must adjust how we lead students to texts and focus on the gradual increase of their abilities to connect with a challenging text and unpack the author’s meaning and method. One way of accomplishing this is through the art of close reading. Close reading is a skill that students develop over many years, with many teachers in many classrooms. It provides students a way to engage with a text, think deeply about it, and form well-supported opinions about it. In developing a deeper understanding of close reading, we should consider how it emerged as an analytical strategy.
The History of Close Reading
Close analysis of text is the result of centuries of emerging literary analysis (Richter, 2007). People have not always read intentionally and analytically, but from the earliest days, analysts have sought methods to understand texts in deep ways and go beyond the words on the page for both literary and informational texts (Richter, 2007). The various schools of literary criticism are the result of centuries of careful development and represent a wide range of methods to approach a text analytically. Thus, an important starting point for understanding the close reading process is examining the development of these literary-critical schools.
The first person to write about the interpretation of human writing was Plato (Richter, 1998). Actually, it is likely he wasn’t the first, but his is the first writing to survive to the present day. Plato presents his ideas through a historical character, Socrates, about whom we know very little beyond what Plato includes in his dialogues. Plato (380 BCE/1992) gives short shrift to poets in The Republic, the book-length dialogue describing Socrates’s vision of the ideal society. Socrates banishes the poets from his city-state, claiming they cannot be trusted to transmit the proper values to young people, thus indicating that the written word does more than just relate a story. Even within the decisions the Greek hero Achilles made in Homer’s Iliad, Socrates interprets a value system that promotes self-interest over the good of the many, something he would not have influencing the young audience of Homer’s epic. Though Socrates is a harsh critic, his comments indicate he sees the power of written language to influence the young.
Some decades after Plato described Socrates’s views, Aristotle (335 BCE/1997) took a different position on written language. Aristotle’s perspective on art is mimetic—it imitates nature. The more similar the art is to its object of imitation, the higher its quality. In his Poetics, which modern scholars believe is little more than a collection of his lecture notes, Aristotle described the tragedy, the form of drama the Athenians so perfected in the 4th century BCE. Unlike
