Monsters & etc.

Davidson College 2026-2027

Close Reading #1: Frankenstein

one passage, a thousand words
1000 words

What’s a Close Reading?

A close reading pays attention to a single passage or phrase, makes a claim about how that passage or phrase works, and shows what that claim can help us see elsewhere in the text.

Sinykin and Winant break down the practice into five steps:

  1. Scene setting
  2. Noticing
  3. Local Claiming
  4. Regional Argumentation
  5. Global Theorizing

For the purposes of this project, you’ll focus on steps 1-4 with a close reading of Frankenstein. We’re setting aside global theorizing because it demands much more knowledge about the Gothic tradition, Romanticism, Shelley’s other work, and monster studies than you’re equipped with (so far)!

Choosing Your Passage

Pick a passage of three to eight sentences from anywhere in the novel. Inside that passage, find a single detail small enough to point at. Sinykin and Winant say it should be “small enough to fit under your fingertip” (5). It might be a single word, a repeated word, punctuation, a shift in tense, and so on. If what you’ve noticed is a mood or a theme, find the single best place where it shows up and point to that.

Your section leader may declare particular passages off-limits for the assignment, say, if you’ve already discussed the passage in detail in class.

Your Claim

A claim is not a description. It’s something reasonably-informed people might have different takes on. If everyone familiar with Frankenstein immediately agrees with your claim, then it’s not really a claim.

Your Evidence

Evidence does not speak for itself. What might be obvious to you about your chosen passage might not be obvious to your reader. Every time you quote the novel, put that quotation to work. Do something with it. Explain why it’s important and how it supports your claim. Too often, students spend insufficient time simply noticing and describing what they see in their passage, and it’s usually because they are trying to avoid “stating the obvious.” Remember that describing your observations of the passage, and detailing what you noticed, is not stating the obvious; rather, it is guiding your reader through your own vision of the passage and how that forms part of your evidence.

Most weak close readings are not weak because their claim is wrong. They’re weak because they do not connect the dots between the quotation and the claim. That’s what evidence is for.

The Four Steps

Each step is a stage of an argument, but they are not equal in size. Here are rough proportions for this close reading, which should come to about 1000 words, plus or minus 100 words.

Step What It Does Approximate Size
Scene Setting Gives a reader only what they need to know in order to see the detail you point to. 100-150 words
Noticing Points at the detail and says why it caught you 100-150 words
Local Claiming Says how to make sense of the detail where it sits (in its sentence, paragraph, or scene) 250-300 words
Regional Argumentation Takes the claim to other places in the novel and says why it matters 400-450 words

Make sure each step logically flows from the next. If you can rearrange your paragraphs without breaking your claim, then you have written a list, not an argument.

Revision

Your section leader will give you plenty of feedback on your first draft. You’ll revise your draft based on that feedback and your own evolving understanding of your chosen passage.

Revision does not mean simply fixing commas. Your final draft will differ substantively from your first draft. Perhaps you’ve homed in on a smaller detail. Maybe you’ve sharpened your claim. Or your regional argumentation shifts.

Either way, you’ll attach a 100-word revision note to your final draft, in which you discuss what changed and what convinced you to change it. The revision note does not count toward the word limit.

AI Policy

You may not use a large language model like Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT for any part of this assignment.

Requirements