Close reading

Close reading means slowing down and treating a short passage as if every word were chosen deliberately – because it usually was. It is the foundation of almost every senior English task: analytical essays, unseen text responses and comparative studies.

Read this original passage: 'The house had been sold in March, and by April it was already forgetting us. New curtains, the colour of weak tea, hung where Mum's yellow ones had been. The lemon tree, which Dad had pruned every winter for twenty years, was gone – a neat circle of fresh turf in its place, as if nothing had ever grown there at all.'

Use a four-lens annotation process. Diction: 'forgetting', 'weak tea', 'neat'. Imagery: the yellow curtains and lemon tree (warmth, life) versus 'weak tea' and fresh turf (pale, empty). Syntax: the long final sentence slows down, and the dash creates a pause before 'gone'. Structure: movement from the house to specific objects, ending on absence.

Next, look for patterns. Here, yellow and lemon form a colour motif linked to the family; both are replaced. The house 'forgetting us' is personification, suggesting places hold memory – and lose it.

Then build an interpretation: the passage explores how quickly the traces of a family's life are erased, and the narrator's grief at being forgotten by a place.

In writing, move from detail to idea: quote a precise word or phrase, unpack its connotations, connect it to a pattern, then state what it reveals about the passage's meaning. Strong close readings are specific – they zoom in on a single word as confidently as on a whole image.