English 10-1 · Close reading
Reading closely: meaning and evidence
Close reading is not reading slowly. It is being able to say what a text means and point at the words that made you think so — and the second half is where all the marks are.
- 1. The words, first
- 2. Inference, with the evidence attached
- 3. Tone, mood and diction
- 4. Purpose and audience
- 5. What costs marks
The words, first
The idea: Tone and mood are treated as one word in ordinary speech and marked as two here.
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Inference | A conclusion drawn from evidence plus reasoning. Without the evidence it is a guess, and a marker cannot credit a guess. |
| Denotation | A word's literal dictionary meaning. |
| Connotation | The associations it carries beyond that. Slender, thin and scrawny denote the same thing and judge it differently. |
| Diction | Word choice. The most reliable evidence for tone. |
| Tone | The writer's or speaker's attitude towards the subject. |
| Mood | The atmosphere created in the reader. |
| Purpose | What the text is trying to do: inform, persuade, entertain, provoke. |
| Audience | Who it was written for. What a writer assumes you already know gives it away. |
| Syntax | Sentence construction — length, order, punctuation. Carries tone as surely as diction does. |
Inference, with the evidence attached
The idea: Claim, evidence, reasoning. Leave out the middle one and there is nothing to mark.
Weak: “The narrator is anxious.”
Strong: “The narrator checks the lock three times and counts the steps to the door, so the routine is doing the work worry usually does — the anxiety is in the behaviour rather than in anything said.”
Same claim; the second one is anchored and can be checked.
Unreliable narration. First person is not unreliability by itself. The evidence is a gap: details reported without being understood, or a self-account the events quietly contradict.
Tone, mood and diction
The idea: Follow the word choice. When the vocabulary changes character, the attitude has moved — and that sentence is the one to quote.
Connotation carries the judgement. A room described as cramped, dim and airless is the same room as one described as small, shaded and still. The first set is where the writer's attitude is hiding.
Syntax does it too. Short blunt sentences create urgency; long accumulating clauses slow a reader down. A shift between the two mid-passage is almost never accidental.
Mood versus tone. Fog, silence and a failing light create a mood without telling you what the narrator thinks. Writing “the tone is eerie” when you mean the mood is the most common terminology error at this level.
Purpose and audience
The idea: Every choice a writer makes was made for somebody. Working out who turns description into explanation.
How to find the audience. Look at what is explained and what is assumed. A text that uses a technical term without defining it has an audience that already knows it; one that stops to explain does not.
How purpose shows. Informing tends to be neutral in diction and ordered by logic. Persuading loads the diction, anticipates objections and addresses the reader. Entertaining prioritises pace and surprise.
Why it earns marks. “The writer uses simple language” is a description. “The writer strips out the jargon because the reader will not have met it, which keeps the argument accessible to people the policy affects” is an analysis — and the difference is that the second one names the audience.
What costs marks
The idea: All four are about evidence.
- Claiming without quoting.
- Confusing tone and mood. Speaker versus reader.
- Naming a device and stopping.
- Summarising instead of analysing. Retelling shows you read it, not that you understood it.