Focusing on the critic’s perspective, the literary tradition has developed a con-cept of close reading. Close reading in this tradition involves what Lanham (1986) has called the know-how to look at a text. This skill of looking at lan-guage within reading is contrasted with conventional content reading, which, in Lanham’s terms, involves looking through a text to its meaning. One can read a text for its plot, never stopping to look at its words and sentences. This is read-ing for understandread-ing but not readread-ing as a writer.
One begins to read as a writer when one looks beyond content to the author’s choice making. Close reading relies on the oscillation between these two views, looking through language to its product — meaning — and looking at it to under-stand the workings of the instrument that provides the product. Close reading insists on never losing focus on the surface text, the actual words priming the reader, even as the reader interprets the words and transforms them into situated
readings. In the literary tradition, the close reader, as normative model, can read as a writer, can spot the writer’s magical tricks that allow readers to forget they are reading.
The Oxford critic I. A. Richards is widely credited for coining the term, using it synonymously with the term practical criticism in a book under that title first published in 1929 (I. A. Richards, 1950). Richards’ idea of practical criticism is to urge readers to examine language not only as bearers of meaning but also as instruments that, in the hands of skilled authors, makes meaning possible.
Critics of the 1970s and 1980s either directly or indirectly attacked the idea of close reading by attacking the school of New Criticism, a literary tradition that prescribed that interpretations stay “within” the text. These critics alleged that such a narrow interpretative focus reduced interpretation to formal marks on the page. It was an error not unlike the error of mistaking a musical compo-sition for the silent notation of a musical score. The critics Louise Rosenblatt (1978) and Wolfgang Iser (1978) argued for the existence of mediating entities between the formal text and reader interpretation, what Rosenblatt called a transaction between writer and reader and what Iser referred to as a virtual text mediating the surface text and the reader’s understanding. Stanley Fish (1980) moved the balance between writer and reader closer to the reader’s side of the equation. He contended that readers must bring their own cultural and histori-cal background and, especially, the communities of interest to which they belong to the interpretation of a text. Fish contended that interpretations are made by individual readers, but even more by the institutionalized communities through which readers work and network.
Fish in many respects is surely right. His worries about overly narrow defini-tions of textual interpretation are justified. The reading experience is not limited solely to marks on the page. It always involves the reader and the communities of interest to which the reader belongs. Despite the many grains of truth in their position, Fish and his adherents have caused some small backlash of its own.
Recently, one prominent journal, Research in the Teaching of English, devoted an entire issue (August 2000) to the efficacy of so-called pure “textual” variables in learning to read and write. Michael W. Smith and Peter Smagorinsky, the editors of the journal, cited the need for the special issue as such:
Twenty years ago, Stanley Fish (1980) asked what has become one of the most famous questions in the recent history of literary criticism: Is there a text in this class? His question resonated for us recently when James Robert Martin, one of our editorial board members, wrote us noting his unease with current literacy research in which, he said, “the text doesn’t really mat-ter” because of the author’s focus on “the context, the social practices in which [the text] is embedded.” (p. 5)
A recent critic of the idea that texts make an independent contribution to the reading experience is Mark Faust (2000), who rejected what he called the
“dualism” between social experience and text in textual processing. Faust observed, “[R]eading is a process that produces different experiences with the same words at different times” (p. 21). The text and the social experience required to interpret it, according to Faust, cannot be pulled apart. Unfortunately, Faust explored no specific examples to argue his point, so let’s provide one, and then study how well his point can be sustained:
11. There is late breaking news. (written over the wire, December 7, 1941) 12. There is late breaking news. (read over radio, November 22, 1963) 13. There is late breaking news. (sent over the Internet, September 11, 2001) These examples focus precisely where Faust asks us to focus — the same words, different times, and undoubtedly different social experiences. But if we look closely, we know these experiences are different precisely because they accommodate a great deal of similarity in the textual experience that we can — contrary to Faust’s thesis of indistinguishability between text and social experi-ence — pull apart from the social experiexperi-ence of interpretation. Notice that each text in these examples relies on a lexical-grammatical string (e.g., there is late breaking) that primes audiences to perceive language being used to update them.
Each textual string primes this update function and the social context of the update helps the reader complete the experience, and so the specific content, of the update. Faust is right to maintain that context and experience can guide lan-guage priming and channel these primings into specific reader interpretations Yet Faust is wrong to maintain that textual and social experiences are indistin-guishable. Social context and experience can complete only what the small priming choices of textual experience help launch. We support Faust’s point that textual interpretation requires words to be imbued with social experience. We disagree with his point that textual experience and social experience start from a non-identical source of origin.
We postulate interpretation as a logically, if not temporally, phased process, with early, upstream, and later, downstream, aspects. The part of the rhetorical art that concerns us most in this book is language experience as a priming art, an art of how words, in combination, initiate the audience’s interpretation. An interpre-tative process won’t end until the audience has had the chance to elaborate the words from the historical, cultural, and personal categories of experience they evoke. We call these elaborations downstream interpretation. An interpretative process won’t get off the ground, however, without the speaker or writer’s words jumpstarting the audience through initial primings, the primings serving as upstream input to the audience’s fuller interpretation downstream.
We focus in this book entirely on the upstream, not the downstream, of inter-pretation. Although we don’t pretend for a moment that close reading is fully captured in the upstream priming properties of words, we can’t lose sight of the fact that close reading can’t be adequately defined without including these initial primings as an indispensable part of the story.
In his own assessment of the difficulty of teaching close reading to under-graduates, McGann and his colleagues (2001) observed that students have great difficultly “negotiating” reading because of their “inclination to ‘read’ texts at relatively high levels of textual abstraction” with “a weakened ability to notice other close details of language — semantic, grammatical, rhetorical” (p. 147).
McGann’s point is that close reading requires noticing the language as well as interpreting it. Interpretation is a high art, visible and touted among critics.
Noticing is a low craft, less visible and often hidden in theories of interpretation.
Nonetheless, close reading requires the cooperation of the high art with the low craft. The close reader must build ties between the upstream of noticing language primings and the downstream of social elaboration. As a geologist builds bold theory from ordinary surface traces in the fossil record, the close reader under-stands that whatever mighty interpretations accrue downstream must at least “fit”
the visible residues found upstream in the surface primings of language.
Close reading requires that deep comprehension be supported by surface-level primings. As B. R. Myers (2001) recently noted in his much-discussed “Reader’s Manifesto,” reviewers of contemporary fiction lose their credibility when they fail to tie their overall evaluations of texts to concrete prose passages. Consider strings 14 to 17, which reviewers have used to evaluate Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-Winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.
14. It’s absolutely gosh-wow, super-colossal — smart, funny.
(The Washington Post)
15. A big, ripe, excitingly imaginative novel.…echoes Ragtime…suggests John Irving. (The New York Times)
16. Some books you read for their plot, some for their style. When, like Chabon’s, both are exceptional, you’re in a rare place. (USA Today) 17. I’m not sure what the ‘great American novel’ is, but I’m pretty sure that
Michael Chabon’s sprawling, idiosyncratic, and wrenching new book is one. (The New York Times Book Review)
High praise indeed. Yet, according to Myers, it is also inflated praise if the reviewer, given the space, is not able to reproduce at least some choice examples of the prose effects Chabon musters to justify it. The “what” of close reading, Myers suggests, should include language visible on the page.
How does one learn close reading? How more specifically does one learn to integrate the surface noticing of language with the deep comprehension of lan-guage, guided by social context? This is a hard question to answer. Let us for the moment turn to Harvard for help. The Harvard Online Writing Center Website (2001) describes “close reading” as a “methodology that asks readers to pay close attention to a text in order to answer some question about that text.”
The method seems clear enough. Yet, is it really? What does it mean to pay close attention to a text? A text is among the most complex information spaces
that human civilizations have designed. What is the object of our attention when we pay attention? As it attempts to define close reading for students, the Harvard instructions beg the question of attention: “Pay attention to the text and you will discover the right things to pay attention to.”
The question begging reveals itself almost this blatantly in the language the Harvard Online Writing Center Website uses to teach the method of close reading:
What words or phrases in these passages do you think are important?
Underline, highlight, or take notes so that you can locate these passages eas-ily.…Now examine these words and phrases closely. What strings emerge?
The Writing Center advises the student to survey where in the text it is fruit-ful to look and then to select one’s specific focus. Unfortunately, the advice begs the question of attention, because students must bring a theory of noticing to the text to assure that their noticing will be well placed and rewarded. The Harvard Writing Center advice identifies skills of textual noticing equivocally: Knowing where to look is both a prerequisite and an outcome of learning to read closely.
The advice unintentionally offers very little assurance: one can learn to read closely only if one already knows how.
Let’s assume for the moment one can learn surface patterns of close reading through the experience of reading itself. As readers, we challenge ourselves when we constantly look at the small actions authors take and ask ourselves — why did the author take that action and not some alternative? As writers, we constantly find ourselves thrown into this challenge whether we like it or not.
For as writers, we must make meaning and expose ourselves to all kinds of sen-tence possibilities that don’t work very well before we find the ones that do. We write draft after draft, often understanding after reading a new draft that we have failed to give our readers the experience we are after. By serving as our own readers of our own drafts, we can often push ourselves to write something that we can agree is worth others reading too.
These observations reflect current conventional wisdom. Yet they leave un-specified what readers must actually do to acquire the skill to notice patterns of surface language associated with close reading. We suggest that readers proba-bly pick up these patterns by playing some equivalent of a mental game we call rhetorical scrabble. We hasten to say “some equivalent” because we don’t claim the details of rhetorical scrabble that go on in the head resemble the details as we describe them. What interests us about the game is not the assumption of its psychological reality but the assumption that it captures some of the felt experi-ence of the speaker or writer seeking to combine words to prime the audiexperi-ence experience. As such, it has served us as a useful heuristic for collecting and cat-egorizing English strings for their value as priming instruments.
In conventional Scrabble, one has some combination of the 26 letters of the alphabet. One takes turns with an opponent to use letters to make words. On
every move, one’s word-making is constrained by the letters all the players have placed on the board in previous turns. If one brings a reading knowledge of, say, 50,000 documented words of English, one must, on every move, search for which of the letters in one’s hand completes one of the words in the docu-mented set.
In rhetorical scrabble, one’s target is not words but strings of words and their ability to prime categories of audience experience. Depending on the length of the text, writers play rhetorical scrabble across tens, hundreds, and thousands of sentences. The speaker or writer’s genre and rhetorical plans affect the audi-ence experiaudi-ence one wants to seed across a planned communication. Language users play rhetorical scrabble at the interface of a longer planning horizon for a message and the very immediate strings to be placed now before the audience’s ears or eyes. Writers, working with an audience who is not physically present, usually play the game against themselves across drafts, seeing if they can create visible language that remains true to their plans and writing context and that adequately pins down the overall text experience they wish to afford readers.
Let us look specifically at how one plays the game. The game starts when-ever the speaker or writer is at the point of composing contiguous language while considering longer-range communicative plans. When the game starts, the speaker or writer has a variety of different ideas about a communication’s general effects on the reader and wants to figure how the next string of words can further those effects.
Let’s assume a writer is working on a cover letter for a job application and wants to create a positive impression. Let’s assume a prior text part where the writer has recently informed the reader that she is active as a community volun-teer and now wants to describe her reason for volunvolun-teering. Let’s say the writer has decided to implement this reason in a sentence beginning: “I wanted to make…” The internal board of the writer’s rhetorical scrabble game may now look as follows:
Initial board: I wanted to make…
Rhetorical scrabble requires pinning down some words in order to reduce the search for the words to come. There are a very large number of arbitrary words following other arbitrary words. The writer’s choice becomes usefully con-strained when searching from a known word or string (e.g., I wanted to make.…).
There is of course no guarantee that the writer will have chosen the best opening sentence frame as a constraint. Research in revision suggests that inexperienced writers have a very difficult time giving up on their opening run, even when encouraged to make global revisions over all their sentences (Faigley and Witte, 1981; Flower, Hayes, Carey, Schriver, and Stratman, 1986). We suspect that novice writers often cling too long to unproductive sentence frames because their play at rhetorical scrabble is limited.
Let us now describe the writer’s first response to the initial playing board. It will be to explore multiple alternative paths from “I wanted to make.…” Imagine the writer creates a decision space that contains the following possible paths:
18. I wanted to make… myself (reflexive path) 19. I wanted to make… my (possessive path) 20. I wanted to make… a (article path) 21. I wanted to make… it (situational-it path)
22. I wanted to make… over (make-over as extended verb path) 23. I wanted to make… up (make-up as extended verb path)
Each pathway opens up a set of new options, each option opening up a new space of rhetorical primings the writer intends for the reader. In rhetorical scrab-ble, the writer explores pathways with the idea of understanding what priming actions will be strengthened, inhibited, layered, or separated, by choice of path-way. Writers must match these different pathways to their overall rhetorical goals.
For example, the initial board already features first person (I) and personal desire (want). Pathway 18 strengthens the tone of personal involvement and self-determination. A deeper search through this pathway reveals the options and primings more clearly:
24. make myself the (best I can be? trite, do I want to join the army?) 25. make myself a laughingstock (not working)
26. make myself at home (not working)
27. make myself conspicuous (for public service? seems inappropriate) 28. make myself heard (sounds defiant)
29. make myself interesting (aren’t I already?)
This deeper exploration helps the writer see that choosing any path leading with myself will strengthen the impression of individual desire and self-determination.
This might be fine in some writing contexts, but in this context, the writer is trying to make a case for her interest in humble public service. The myself continuations create rhetorical primings that are too ego-centered and self-absorbed, undermining the sense of self-effacement that the writer understands the larger context calls for.
Let us now fast forward and assume the writer is much deeper in the game and has decided that pathway 21 looks the most promising space for solutions. The situational it continuation inhibits some of the unwanted meanings the writer wants to dampen, as it turns the focus off the writer herself (unlike the reflexive and possessive continuations of 18 and 19) and on some situation detached from her personal ego. Assume then that the writer accepts this pathway and now explores her set of continuations from there. A deeper exploration of pathways from 21 reveals more moves to take:
30. make it the (calls for a detached situation not yet composed) 31. make it my business to (personalization and possible defiance) 32. make it a practice of (calls for an abstraction not yet composed) 33. make it a practice to (calls for recurring goal not yet composed)
Rhetorical scrabble is fraught with contingency, a contingency seldom acknowledged in traditional language references. Novice writers have difficulty experiencing this contingency as anything but frustration. Novices come easily to words but they come less easily to them as part of a rhetorical art. As a result, they tend to have a hard time seeing words as thrilling instruments that are always reaching beyond themselves — not infrequently beyond the intentions they are able to form to play the instrument as well as it can be played — into the reader’s world of afforded experience. It is hard to develop a love of contin-gency if contincontin-gency itself is dismissed as a mistake of inexperience that good
Rhetorical scrabble is fraught with contingency, a contingency seldom acknowledged in traditional language references. Novice writers have difficulty experiencing this contingency as anything but frustration. Novices come easily to words but they come less easily to them as part of a rhetorical art. As a result, they tend to have a hard time seeing words as thrilling instruments that are always reaching beyond themselves — not infrequently beyond the intentions they are able to form to play the instrument as well as it can be played — into the reader’s world of afforded experience. It is hard to develop a love of contin-gency if contincontin-gency itself is dismissed as a mistake of inexperience that good