Why Close Reading is Important

Close reading is a very valuable skill for college because it helps you to better decipher the text you are reading. Not everybody will be able to automatically understand what the text is saying, even if a student were to read the text multiple times they still might not get it. That's where close reading comes in handy. Making the annotations will cause the student to think about what the author is trying to convey through the text. Even if the student doesn't fully understand what the text means they still get a better understanding of what it is the author is conveying. A lot of the things that they give you to read in college are more advanced than most peoples current reading levels. Close reading helps you to question the things that the writer wrote. Depending upon how deep the anotations delve into the text you can see the same sentence in three different points of view. Each of these view points can create different paths on which you can take the rest of the story along. By taking the story along these different paths you can find out more and more about how other people, including possibly the author himself, view the text. By doing this you also learn to expand your horizons further than they previously were. Close reading is an extremely valuable skill for your college years, so everybody who plans on going to college should learn how to close read as soon as possible.