Teaching the Academic Language
of Close Reading and Quote Analysis
by Regina
Masiello
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| Defining the Problem: Why
Students Can't Close Read a Text |
Although I was not surprised to find my students clumsily inserting
quotes, without analysis, into their first papers, I was surprised
when by paper two the problem had not gotten any better. The "problem,"
as I initially identified it, was two-sided. First, my students
seemed to choose quotes arbitrarily, without regard for the meaning
of the chosen passages, sometimes going so far as to quote sections
of text which disproved rather than bolstered their assertions.
Second, even when they chose appropriate quotes, they had not the
slightest inclination what to do with them, how to tell the reader
how the text worked and why it was important to their project. I
had told my class that analysis started with explaining how and
why a given passage worked to substantiate a claim, but apparently
this lesson was not effective.
For paper three, I decided I needed to provide my students not
only with a heightened awareness of textual meaning but also with
the mechanics of analysis, a method of writing that explained how
and why a quote worked. As a graduate student studying literatures
in English I decided to meet this challenge with a lesson describing
the central activity of my discipline. I decided to give a lesson
on "close reading."
My decision to teach my students "close reading" made
me a bit uneasy; unsure of my own beliefs about textual meaning,
or the production of textual meaning, I struggled with the frame
such a lesson would need. Terry Eagleton's famous warning about
the practice of "close reading" informed my preparations:
To call for close reading, in fact, is to do more than insist
on due attentiveness to the text. It inescapably suggests an attention
to this rather than something else: to the 'words on the page' rather
than to the context which produced and surround them . . . But in
dispelling such anecdotal irrelevancies, 'close reading' also held
at bay a good deal else: it encouraged the belief that any piece
of language, 'literary' or not, can be adequately studied or even
understood in isolation. It was the beginnings of a 'reification'
of the literary work, the treatment of it as an object in itself,
which was to be triumphantly consummated in the American New Criticism.
(38)
After having already called my students' attention to the importance
of context, to the possibility of authorial biases, and to the possible
existence of untruths embedded in the voice of authority, I dreaded
undoing such important lessons by convincing my students (and probably
reaffirming the message they had no doubt received all of their
lives about textual authority), that the text was an unequivocal
voice of reason and judgment which could not be questioned or stretched.
Besides being antithetical to the department's methodology, reaffirming
absolute textual authority was certainly antithetical to my own
hopes as a teacher; I aimed at encouraging my students to think
inside of, outside of, around, under and over the text, not simply
in line with it. To avoid "reification" of the texts,
a lesson in close reading would have to be planned carefully and
executed with caution so as not to undermine the course's pedagogy
as a whole.
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| An Exercise in Close Reading |
I started my lesson by writing the following portion of an unidentified
student's paper on the chalkboard. The student quoted Peter Drucker's
essay "The Age of Social Transformation" and followed
it with "analysis."
"The productivity of the nonknowledge, services worker will
become the social challenge of the knowledge society. On it will
depend the ability of the knowledge society to give decent incomes,
and with them dignity and status, to nonknowledge workers"
(Drucker 257).
As people become more and more knowledgeable, people are faced
with more and newer opportunities of the knowledge society.1
I asked the class to read the quote silently (avoiding reading
it in my own voice for fear that I might inadvertently emphasize
key words), and to be prepared to comment on the selection to the
whole class. One student raised his hand and said that this person
had done what "he was supposed to do," he had, after all,
followed a quote with analysis. Before I could respond, however,
another student in my class disagreed: "That isn't analysis
though, is it? The quote doesn't say what that person says it does,
does it?"2
I asked the student, whose insightful question sent the discussion
in the direction I had hoped it would take, to elaborate. Why did
she feel that the two sentences did not go together? What words,
specifically, made her think that? Laura pointed to the fact that
Drucker "seemed" to be talking about "nonknowledge
workers" while the author of the paper was talking about the
success of the "knowledge worker" (Laura was more comfortable
speaking in declarative statements about her classmate than about
Drucker). Soon after, students were pointing to the disparity between
Drucker's statement about "challenges" and "dignity"
and the student author's comments about "new opportunities."
After a few minutes of class discussion I distributed a section
of another unidentified student's paper to the class. This student
had demonstrated the ability to read quotes "closely"
and to communicate those readings with the standard "academic"
practice of "re-quoting." I asked volunteers from the
class to read aloud portions of this student's paper, one of which
consisted of the following:
Drucker describes the knowledge society as, "the first
society in which ordinary people--that means most people--do not
earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow" (Drucker
255). By using the term "sweat of their brow," Drucker
is stating that knowledge workers will not be doing manual labor.
He also describes them as "specialized" (Drucker 258).
However, in Michael Pollan's essay, "specialized knowledge
workers can be found, but are in actuality working by the "sweat
of their brow". This is seen through Danny Forsyth, a farmer
interviewed by Pollan. His typical day, as told by Pollan; "typically
begins early in the spring with a soil fumigant, to control nematodes
. . . then, at planting, a systematic insecticide (like Thimet)
is applied to the soil . . . after planting, Forsyth puts down a
Sencor . . ." (Pollan 468). Terms such as "nematodes"
and "thimet" wouldn't be known by an average generalized
worker. Forsyth is obviously specialized in his field; he is a knowledge
worker using his knowledge to take care of his potatoes. Yet, at
the same time, he is also using manual labor--a piece which Drucker
doesn't seem to fit into his idea of the "knowledge worker."
Clearly, Drucker's definition of a knowledge worker is faulty.
While I can only conjecture about this student's background (she
wore expensive clothing and carried an expensive designer handbag
to class), she had clearly been exposed to standard academic prose.
She knew how to indicate which portions of a text suited her needs,
and was even capable of, to borrow a term from composition theorist
David Bartholomae, "mimicking" the language of the university.3
That this was, again in Bartholomae's terms, a "bluff,"
revealed itself when the student introduced a quote with a semicolon
instead of the appropriate colon, or called a phrase a "term."
But her thinking was complex, and she had, unlike so many of my
other students, a mode of expressing that complexity. After the
students read the sample paper, I explained that this person was
"close reading" a passage, and that by repeating words
from the quote itself, she was doing something called "re-quoting."
I explained that this was a good way of telling a reader how a quote
worked to substantiate a claim. I asked my students to identify
some of the other moments in the paper, besides the one above, that
used this method of analysis, and volunteers accomplished the task
quickly and efficiently.
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| Close Reading, Part II:
Some Unexpected Developments |
After the sample paper I distributed a handout with the following
quote from Michael Pollan's essay "Playing God in the Garden":
The biotech industry, with the concurrence of the Food and Drug
Administration, has decided we don't need to know it, so biotech
foods carry no identifying labels. In a dazzling feat of positioning,
the industry has succeeded in depicting these plants simultaneously
as the linchpins of a biological revolution--part of a "new
agricultural paradigm" that will make farming more sustainable,
feed the world and improve health and nutrition--and, oddly enough,
as the same old stuff, at least so far as those of us at the eating
end of the food chain should be concerned. (460)
Just as the student's paper above had used close reading to question
Drucker's terms, the passage I chose from Pollan's essay challenged
the veracity of authoritative claims, in this case the claims of
the biotech industry. While I was teaching "close reading,"
still keeping Eagleton's warning in mind, I was carefully selecting
pieces of writing that thematized the importance of context, or
the questioning of authority.
After reading the quote aloud, I reminded my students of Monsanto's
response to Pollan's essay, which we had read in class only a few
weeks earlier. I then asked my students to explain why the quote
was important and to focus on specific words in the text. I followed
this handout with two others, one with a quote from Drucker's essay
and another with a quote from Becker's essay "False Science,
False Promises." These quotes also thematized the unreliability
of information, and I cautioned my students about each of these
authors and their positions. I reminded my students of an earlier
class discussion during which students had complained that Drucker
"doesn't use evidence like we have to," and about the
possibility that authors of different nationalities (pointing to
Becker) might have a different perspective on historical events.
After my students wrote about each quote for ten minutes, I asked
them to consider how the three quotes might connect. I told my students
that each person would be expected to explain at least one connection
by pointing to specific words in each passage that connect to another
passage. After ten more minutes of in-class writing, the group formed
a large circle.
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| "Once
my students started reporting their connections I was astonished;
not only had they pointed to connections I had not identified, but
they had also questioned the reliability of those connections." |
Once my students started reporting their connections
I was astonished; not only had they pointed to connections I had not
identified, but they had also questioned the reliability of those
connections. For example, one student focused on the words "dreams,"
"dazzling," and "spirit," saying that each quote
invoked a realm of mystical possibility, or, as she had said it, "hope."
After making her already sophisticated connection, she added, half
giggling, "we don't really know if we can trust these people
to really have cared about giving people hope though."
Beyond the fact that the exercise had led to astonishingly varied
and, in some cases, sophisticated connections, my students had not
simply accepted the texts at face value; instead, they had become
attentive to meaning while simultaneously questioning the source of
that meaning. At the time I attributed this to a well-planned activity;
I had called my students' attention to the meaning of the words on
the page without isolating the text from its context. The discussion
itself signaled success, but as I had been warned about the frequent
and upsetting phenomenon whereby students have lively discussions
in class and translate these talks into boring and often troubled
papers, I decided to poll the class about the activity.
One student commented that she was "glad we did that because
now she knew how to give a thorough analysis of quotes." Similarly,
another student commented that it "gave him an easier and more
thorough way of explaining quotes." Several others indicated
that they had tried to incorporate the new technique into their third
papers, though it was "hard to do." Although I began to
feel good about the experiment, as though I had "empowered"
my students, or given them a "tool" they felt comfortable
using, I considered the essay I planned to assign later in the term
and the warning that James C. Scott issues therein: "power relations
are ubiquitous. They are surely different at opposite ends of the
continuum, but they are never absent" (521). Although the classroom
cannot be compared to power-laden contexts such as the master-slave
relationship, it must be identified as an area where power often influences
the way people speak to one another. How could I be sure that "domination,"
or my position as teacher and their positions as students, was not
affecting "public discourse"? How could I be certain that
my students were not performing their role as students, and simply
telling me what they thought I wanted to hear?
While I believed my students' comments to be valuable on some levels,
and moments of criticism which insulted the activity indicated that
perhaps my exhorting them to be "honest" actually influenced
their responses, I now felt as though their evaluations could not
be used to determine the definitive "success" of the activity.
Their responses to my informal poll could only be part of my determination
of success.
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| "My
students had struggled with including analysis not because they had
nothing to say, or because they had not given the text its due attention,
but because they lacked a way of saying what they meant." |
When I received paper three there was indeed evidence that my students
had started to integrate the new technique. The following excerpt
comes from a student paper which seemed to effectively be using
"close reading" to analyze quotes:
In China "there was no time to wait for them to become
convinced, they would have to be forcibly dragged into the twentieth
century. Everything connected with traditional beliefs was smashed
in the Great Leap Forward" (Becker 110). The words "forcibly
dragged" and "smashed" are words associated with
violence. Obviously the Mao needed more than just the right words
to convince millions of people to follow his lead, and those who
held back the group were "smashed" along with China's
"traditional beliefs."
While I was of course pleased to get interesting readings of the
texts, I realized that such nuanced interpretations had little to
do with my "brilliantly planned" lesson. As a graduate
student trained in English I had assumed that a lesson in close
reading was what my students needed; indeed my only concern in planning
the lesson had been guarding against the pitfalls of "close
reading." Unfortunately, I had misidentified "the problem,"
as I had called it, from the beginning.
My students had struggled with including analysis not because they
had nothing to say, or because they had not given the text its due
attention, but because they lacked a way of saying what they meant.
According to Bartholomae the student "has to learn to speak
our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of
knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding and arguing
that define the discourse of our community" (511). Just as
the student above refers to "the Mao" revealing that the
voice of academic analysis is still in some senses borrowed, the
paper I had distributed in class revealed its "bluff"
by peppering analysis with small writing errors. These "bluffs"
do not indicate a lack of engagement with the assigned material;
instead, they disclose a student learning to "speak our language,"
or to communicate his thoughts about a text in the "peculiar
ways" of the academy.
Finding a sample paper which had actually used close reading and
re-quoting had seemed just a lucky chance, and was, in fact, the
least premeditated move in my lesson plan. It turned out to be the
most crucial part of the class. It served as a model that other
students could and would co-opt. My lesson had given my students
a model of "selecting" and "reporting" they
could follow. My students' ability to think had not changed in the
course of a week, but rather they had discovered an avenue of "participation":
"Much of the written work students do is test-taking, report
or summary, work that places them outside the working discourse
of the academic community, where they are expected to admire and
report on what we do, rather than inside that discourse, where they
can do its work and participate in a common enterprise. This is
a failure of teachers and curriculum designers who, even if they
speak of writing as a mode of learning, all too often represent
writing as a 'tool' to be used by an (hopefully) educated mind"
(Bartholomae 517).
My "failure" as an instructor had come from thinking my
students needed a "tool" to help them do work that they
were not yet doing. Instead, my students needed a mode of expressing
the work they were already doing, a mode that was validated by the
academic community.
Now I reflected back on my students' informal evaluations. There
they had communicated this very thing; nowhere did they write that
this activity "made them think better" or that they now
had "a greater appreciation for textual meaning." While
I believe that some of my students may have been reminded to take
an extra look at the words of a quote, or to pay some special attention
to passages they intended to include in their papers, for the most
part their evaluations explained that this activity had given them
a way to do what was being asked of them.
Although several of my students indicated that integrating the new
technique was "hard" to do, the fact that the sample paper
I had distributed was not the work of a professor or authority made
the language of the academy more accessible and easier to mimic.
Imitating the language of the academy in their papers may have seemed
difficult, but not impossible; after all, a member of the class,
a fellow student, had already done it successfully. My class was
full of first year college students unacquainted with the sounds
of academic language, and my lesson gave them a sample of the language
they could use to communicate their ideas. The lesson (no longer
rightfully dubbed a lesson in close reading), gave them a script
from which to perform their roles as Expository Writing students.
The activity was a success. It was a success not because it "enlightened"
my students, not because they had not been paying attention to the
text in the first place, but because it gave them a method by which
to imitate the sounds of academia. Ultimately, it provided them
with an accessible model from which to "invent the university,"
or at least to invent a voice in Expository Writing.
1. I quote all students' papers as they appeared
without using the [sic] notation to mark each grammatical error.
2.This exchange probably warrants a paper of its
own; I continue to be astonished by the difference between my male
students' comments and my female students' comments. While my male
student definitively stated that the selection in question performed
its duties, my female student vocalized her opinion in the form
of a question. Though such an exploration is beyond the scope of
this paper, this classroom exchange raises questions about gendered
behaviors in the academic setting.
3. See David Bartholomae, "Inventing the University"
in Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook, eds. Ellen Cushman, Eugene R.
Kintgen, Barry M. Kroll, and Mike Rose (Boston: 2001), p. 511.
Works Cited
Bartholomae, David. "Inventing the University." Literacy:
A Critical Sourcebook. eds. Ellen Cushman, Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry
M. Kroll and Mike Rose. Boston: Bedford, 2001. 511-524.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1996.
Scott, James C. Selections from " Domination and the Arts
of Resistance." The New Humanities Reader. Eds. Richard E.
Miller and Kurt Spellmeyer. 2nd Ed. Boston: Houghton, 2001.
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