Ok, so first things first. What is "close reading"? You can't
teach it if you don't tell them exactly what you mean by the
term. But telling them isn't enough, because it's too abstract.
You've got to tell them, and then also trick them into doing it.
So, as a basic definition, I usually explain that it's really
dealing with the words in a passage of text. That it's not using
a passage to speak for you, but rather looking deeply at the
passage and explaining what it says. I tell them to use the
prompt of "in other words" to start the process. So, let's say
you're dealing with this passage from Patricia Duncker's
BRILLIANT novel Hallucinating Foucault: "You ask me what I fear
most. You know already or you would not ask. It is the loss of
my reader, the man for whom I write. My greatest fear is that
one day, unexpectedly, suddenly, I will lose you. We never see
one another and we never speak directly, yet through the writing
our intimacy is complete. My relationship with you is intense
because it is addressed e