ENG 221

Notes on the Reading Response

Summary

A summary is a brief recap of the most important points—plot, character, and so on—in a work of literature. In order to demonstrate that you have understood a poem, essay or story, somewhere in the opening of a good reading response the student author summarizes the work, and also lets the audience know what craft element they will be examining in the following pages.

Though there is little creativity or independent thought involved in summary, it’s not always simple. It’s a skill to be able to economically state, in two or three sentences, what is most vital about a piece of literature.

Close Reading

In a close reading of a passage of literature, the student author takes what it subtle or implicit in a work and makes it explicit and clear. Literary language is often densely packed with meaning, and your job is to spell out that meaning for the reader. In a good close reading, you never merely state the obvious. Instead, you pay attention to specific elements of craft: like imagery, figurative language, characterization, story, voice, setting, word choice, and even grammar and punctuation. The task of close reading is two-fold: (1) to point out, or identify, salient elements of craft chosen by the author, and (2) to speculate on how these choices affect the meaning of the whole, and sometimes, to also speculate on why the artist chose this way of writing over other possibilities.

A good paragraph of a close reading within a reading response often has three elements.

• A Point
• An Illustration of that point, taken from the text and cited with a page number.
• An Explication of this illustration which speculates on possible meanings

It’s helpful to remember the acronym PIE when doing a close reading. Point. Illustration. Explication.

The point and the explication are the hard parts; that’s where you have to think about what you want to say that will add meaning to a discussion of the piece and not merely summarize what anyone who has read the piece already knows.

Example: a paragraph of a close reading of Meredith Hall’s essay “Shunned”

Point (about characterization)

Meredith Hall, in the very first line of her essay “Shunned”, takes a risk and characterizes herself as someone who can be off-putting, even annoying. From the beginning, she’s willing to be so self-implicating, and vulnerable, because the alternative is too unthinkable.

Illustration (indented because it’s a full sentence or more, with the page number cited at the end)

“Even now I talk too much and too loud, claiming ground, afraid that I will disappear from this life, too, from this time of being mother and teacher and friend. That It—everything I care about, that I believe in, that defines and reassures me—will be wrenched from me again.” (1) 

Explication

In opening her essay this way, Hall is doing exactly the opposite of what she did when she was an adolescent, when she retreated into silence and depression, when she said nothing when she was told she could not keep her baby, when she did nothing to prevent her baby from being given up for adoption. She regrets this, and she tells us so later, but now, in this opening line, she is not only speaking up for the girl she once was, she’s doing something about it also. In writing her essay, and her book, she is taking action. And so she is risking being Shunned again, by family members now who may not want this to be such common knowledge (the book is a national bestseller), and even perhaps by some readers who think people should keep their troubles to themselves. But she’s been silent for a long time and can keep silent no longer.

Notice that there’s nothing that I’ve written above that wasn’t said in our class discussion. But I’ve put what we’ve said here in a form that I hope you will emulate in your responses throughout the semester. Does every paragraph have to have three parts? No. Does every point you make have to be supported by illustrations from the text? No. But you do need to do this often in a good response. For each craft element (for each important new craft vocabulary term in a chapter), you need to identify its use and subject it to this kind of close reading.

What is it about? What about what it’s about?

Often, in a good response, the student author will close with remarks that speak not just to what a piece is about but why this piece of literature is relevant to them. In other words, a good response doesn’t merely state what the piece is about. A good response also speculates on what this particular essay, story or poem says about its theme that isn’t merely common knowledge but is, in some way, relevant or significant to the reader. Finally, the student author needs to make some connection between (1) the craft element discussed in the response, and (2) the larger relevance or significance of the essay, story or poem. How does the use of this craft element help the author to say something important about their subject?