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When it comes to school work, my idea of reading closely is skimming, but I don’t think that is what is considered “traditional” style of close reading, so being the teenager of the twenty-first century that I am, I turned to google to help construct what most people would deem an appropriate definition of close reading. Learning A-Z states that close reading requires students to get completely involved in the text and take note of the diction the author uses; based off that definition, it is clear that neither me nor investigation 2 are very traditional, but stead lie on opposite ends of the reading spectrum.

Though the investigation calls us to become absorbed into the text, we are not asked to observe all of the diction used such is the situation in a traditional setting, but instead just one specific word, which I suppose could be considered a close reading on steroids, but it seems similar to doing a puzzle backwards. Instead of using copious amounts of words to make a big picture, we are using the big picture to focus on a specific word and seeing if and how the meaning changes throughout the text. It is very similar to the in-class activity we did where we split into five different groups and analyzed five different words that continuously arouse in the text and evaluated if it changed, if there were certain words associated with it, etc., so aka a fifteen minute version of investigation two where we were able to dip our toes into that form of analysis. By using this super-obsessive method (similar to the way Spongebob and Patrick are looking at the map at the beginning of this blog)  of examining literature, it is a magnification of what the reader has already magnetized; making our argument very specific, but because it is about honing in on one word, the investigator can easily find every instance in which the word is used, and BAM! There are dozens of pieces of evidence in which the argument can be supported with.

Overall this is a very definite method of looking at literature, but it will allow us as scholars to dig deeper into the meanings of words, and how their connotation affects the text as a whole. Though traditional style grants us the same ability to analyze text, it is done so in a different manner, whereas the close-r reading style allows us to “cut corners” in a way, and become very specific very quickly in  what I want to argue. Though “intense” is continuously used to describe this style of close reading, I believe it only takes a different style of thinking.