How do I improve at close reading?

The key to successfully analysing a piece of writing - whether it's a poem, or a play, or a passage of prose - is to "read" from the large to the small.This means that you should first consider the piece as a whole, in broad strokes: what type of writing is it (a poem, a short story, an excerpt of a play etc.)? Is it written in verse or prose? What kind of verse is it (free verse, Iambic pentameter, rhymed or unrhymed etc.)? Who wrote it? In what historical period did they write it? Does it belong to a tradition, or is it perhaps in response to another work? Note that knowing the answers to these latter three questions is not 100% necessary to a successful close reading. You can construct a worthwhile analysis of a text without any knowledge of its context whatever, though knowing at least a little will always help. Next you should read through the work as a whole and summarise it mentally. This will help you to fix the details of the text's narrative or argument in your mind, which will help in the actual work of line-for-line, word-for-word analysis. Consider also the relation of the title to the text. Try to envisage what the author wants to say in this work and how he goes about saying it.Then read through the work again more closely, annotating and analysing each line or sentence separately. (Though, obviously, some segments will be less significant and interesting than others.) A good technique for this type of analysis is to look for for ambiguities, and then to ask why the author has chosen to include them. This applies both to larger ideas and to specific word choices. For instance, in a close reading of Wallace Steven's poem The Emperor of Ice Cream you should spend a decent amount of time considering what the poet means when he writes "Let be be finale of seem." What, essentially, is Stevens saying here? Why, in this line, does Stevens uses the specifically obscure construction "be be"? And why the theatrical term "finale"? It's OK to come up with more than one conclusion in answer to these questions: including multiple readings of a single line in your essay shows that you have considered such passages intelligently from multiple angles. Your own opinions of a text can be included at A Level and will perhaps give your analysis a personal flavour, but be warned that your purpose in close reading is primarily analytical, not evaluative. This type of close analysis should make up the largest portion of your close reading, both in terms of writing an essay and in actual time spent thinking and annotating the text.This method of close reading will work both for for prepared classroom pieces and for unseen texts in an exam-room setting. The best way to improve at close reading is to practice using this method on a variety of different works over a variety of different periods.