Here are the first three paragraphs of Kurt Vonnegut’s classic short story, “Harrison Bergeron”: HARRISON BERGERON THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was…
Chapter two of Reading Reconsidered discusses Close Reading. There’s a lot to discuss, some of which I’ve shared in other blog posts (also here and here). But here, I just want to share the rationale. To Erica Colleen and me, there are three especially compelling reasons why Close Reading is so important: First, Close Reading helps defend…
Recently I observed a very good high school reading teacher leading a lesson that did a lot of things well. But the lesson also struggled with some very common challenges, especially around the idea of Close Reading (a topic we discuss extensively in our forthcoming book Reading Reconsidered) and it got some of us at TLaC…
Colleen, Erica, and I are about to put our manuscript of Reading Reconsidered to bed. One of the most important chapters is on Close Reading, and Close Reading has a definition problem. We set out to start our discussion of it with a rock-solid definition and that process required a bit of Close Reading in and…
Colleen, Erica and I are about to wrap up the manuscript of Reading Reconsidered. One of the most important chapters in it is about Close Reading which, we note, has become an urgent clarion call but remains relatively poorly defined… except here we hope. In the excerpt below, we discuss one of the key tasks of…