How do I demonstrate good close reading in an exam?

The key to good close reading is understanding the text: read the passage through slowly and carefully, and make sure you understand what’s happening. If it’s a poem, what is the poet trying to say? Or what is their subject? If it’s a prose passage, what exactly is happening, and whose perspective is it happening from? If it’s a play (especially Shakespeare, since he uses so few stage directions), look closely to see if anything the actor says might indicate what they are doing on-stage: this is an easy way to demonstrate close attention to the text and make a good point as well! Once you’ve established what’s happening in the text, it’s much easier to pick out words or ways of phrasing that might be important. For instance: 'I met a traveller from an antique land,/Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone/Stand in the desert' (Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias: ll.1-3) Even though this is only the first couple of lines, there’s a lot to say here. First of all, the narrator of the poem is an ‘I’ (and remember that a first person narrator doesn’t mean it’s the poet speaking: referring to them as ‘the narrator’ is a safe way of not assuming, for instance, that Shelley himself met the traveller) but they are relating the words of someone else: ‘a traveller from an antique land’. The ‘I’ narrator establishes a sense of proximity to the reader, and a sense of shared experience as both narrator and reader hear the story together. This sense of story-telling is heightened by the mythical associations of the traveller: they are unfixed, constantly moving and defined by their transitional state; they are not simply from a different country, but ‘an antique land’, suggesting a historical authority and adding a mythical and mysterious quality both to the traveller and the words they speak. Already, just from asking yourself who is speaking, and how they are described or describe themselves, you’ve demonstrated that you can closely read a text.