Higher Close Reading Homework
Every week, you will be given a good quality article from a newspaper or factual magazine such as ‘The Scotsman,’ ‘The Guardian,’ ‘The Herald’ or their Sunday equivalents. These are the type of publications which you should also read regularly in order to deepen your skills in Understanding, Analysis and Evaluation.
This is so that you become more used to reading non-fiction in your own time. This will improve your vocabulary, improve your close reading ability and it will generally make you a wiser and more aware person.
Step One – Understanding (always in your own words)
a) Briefly summarise the story or article. So far as is possible, do this by identifying five key ideas in this passage. *
b) Identify a word which you do not know – from the surrounding passage, show how you are able to work out its meaning from context.
*Tip: draw an outline round your hand in your jotter. In the centre of your palm, write the topic of the passage as a whole. Then, write each of the five key ideas inside a finger.
Step Two – Analysis
Select as many features of language as possible in the writing that you noticed which have been used for a particular effect. Consider the following:
1. Structure
Sentence types (statement, questions, exclamation, command, minor or short sentence, long sentence).
Punctuation (brackets, ellipses, commas, dashes, colons, semi-colons and its purpose e.g. parenthesis)
Sentence patterns (Inversion, repetition, climax and anti-climax, antithesis, long and short sentences) or Paragraphing.
2. Varieties of Language
Formal and Informal (formal, informal, dialect, jargon, slang, rhetorical)
Literal and Figurative language:
Comparisons (metaphors, similes, personification and so on).
Sound effects (alliteration, onomatopoeia, consonance, rhyme etc.)
Over/understatement/talking in circles (hyperbole, litotes, euphemism and circumlocution)
Contrasts, opposites and contradictions (paradox, oxymoron and juxtaposition)
New, old and overused (neologism, archaism, cliché)
3. Tone
Light hearted, conversational, effusive, ironic, tongue-in-cheek, satirical, serious and so on.
Tip: As appropriate, use PEE / bullet points / just as […] so / and consider every point you make as being worth up to two marks each.
Step Three - Evaluation
How effective do you find the concluding paragraph in summing up the writer’s argument? Your answer should refer to ideas and/or language and/or tone and make link this back to ideas and/or language and/or tone from earlier in the passage.