Monsters & etc.

Davidson College 2026-2027

Close Reading #2

another passage, another close reading
1000 words

What’s a Close Reading Again?

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 understand 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 work through steps 1-4 with a close reading of either R.U.R., “Jesus Christ in Texas,” or John Proctor Is the Villain.

Choosing Your Passage

Pick a passage of three to eight lines from anywhere in the text. 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, a specific stage direction, or so on. Start with this detail to launch your noticing and build your local claiming, don’t expect to build the entire 1000-word around a single detail.

Noticing

One pattern we saw in the first close reading was a tendency to move quickly past the noticing into claiming. Stay with the noticing for a while.

Your Claim

A claim is not a description. It’s something reasonably-informed people might have different takes on. If everyone familiar with the play 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 script, put that quotation to work. Do something with it. Explain why it’s important and how it supports your claim.

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 1,000 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 150-200 words
Local Claiming Says how to make sense of the detail where it sits (in its immediate dialogue or or scene) 250-300 words
Regional Argumentation Takes the claim to other places in the play and says why it matters 400-450 words

Make sure each step builds logically on the previous step. 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. Furthermore, you may not use Grammarly at all.

Requirements