Assignments

Close Reading

This assignment provides practice in the skill of shifting from attentive reading to active analysis--the kind of analysis that can generate ideas for papers and other scholarly projects.

After you create your version of your passage, you can mark it up by hand or in a digital environment. Either way, place the results in your Classwork Document in a way that shows me how you have worked through every step of the assignment. (Mainly, that means number your answers so I can see how you have responded to each prompt.) Here are the steps:

Choose one of Shakespeare's sonnets from the syllabus (1, 2, 3, 5, 15, 16, or 20).
Type the poem into your own document. (Even if you have a version you can copy and paste, I strongly recommend typing the poem yourself. You can learn about a piece by letting it flow through your fingers.)
Read your poem out loud at least once. (This step does not need to be visible in the work you turn in.)
Read the poem carefully, marking anything that strikes you as interesting, unusual, weird, or otherwise exceptional. Try to capture something specific about each of your reactions in the margins.
Look up any words you don’t know in the Oxford English Dictionary, available through this page of the library site. Note that the OED is organized chronologically, so it can help you understand what definitions were available to Shakespeare. Add a brief definition in the margin for each word you identified.
Go back through the poem and write down any patterns you see. These patterns can be repeated words, synonyms, repetitions of parts of speech, sentence structure, words about color or size--whatever you notice. Be creative about what kind of patterns you see.
Use a word counter (such as this one) to see what other repetitions it reveals. If the results suggest any new patterns to you, add them to your list.
Look for any anomalies or things that don’t fit the patterns. Write at least two of them down next to the patterns you have noted, along with a thought about what each anomaly might add to your thinking about what you saw in the pattern.
Write three things you have now noticed about the poem that you didn't see the first time through.
Finally, choose one of the three things from the last step and write one or two sentences about how it might connect to some other part of the text.

Adapted from an assignment written by Carolyn Jacobson