English 20-1 · Close reading
Reading closely: prose and images
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 the marks are.
- 1. The words, first
- 2. Inference with evidence
- 3. Tone, mood and diction
- 4. Visual and media texts
- 5. What costs marks
The words, first
The idea: Tone and mood get used interchangeably in ordinary speech and are marked as different things here.
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Inference | A conclusion drawn from evidence in the text plus reasoning. If you cannot point at the evidence, it is a guess. |
| Denotation | A word's literal dictionary meaning. |
| Connotation | The associations a word carries beyond that. Slender, thin and scrawny denote the same thing and judge it differently. |
| Diction | A writer's 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. Tone belongs to the speaker, mood to you. |
| Purpose | What the text is trying to do: inform, persuade, entertain, provoke. |
| Audience | Who it is written for. Diction and level of detail both give it away. |
| Syntax | Sentence construction — length, order, punctuation. Carries tone as surely as word choice does. |
| Focal point | In a visual text, the element the eye reaches first. |
| Composition | How elements are arranged in a frame, and what that arrangement does to a viewer. |
Inference with evidence
The idea: Every claim needs a quotation or a specific detail attached to it. A marker cannot give credit for a reading they cannot trace.
A worked shape. Instead of “the narrator is anxious”, write: “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, but now it is anchored.
Unreliable narration. First person is not unreliability by itself. The evidence is a gap: details the narrator reports without understanding, 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 usually the one to quote.
Connotation carries the judgement. A house described as cramped, dim and airless is the same house as one described as small, shaded and still. The first set of words 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.
Tone shifts. Look for the sentence where the diction turns — warm to clinical, expansive to clipped. Identifying the turn and quoting it is a standard high-scoring move.
Visual and media texts
The idea: An image is a text. The techniques are different and the analysis has the same shape: name the choice, say what it does.
Camera angle positions the viewer. Low angle looking up makes a subject imposing; high angle looking down makes it small. These are conventions, so they can also be used ironically.
Editorial cartoons compress an argument into a picture. Caricature — exaggerating one feature — makes a judgement visible at a glance. Analysing one means naming the exaggeration and then saying what claim it makes.
What to write about. Focal point, composition and framing, lighting and colour, angle, symbols, and the relationship between image and any text. Pick two or three that are doing real work rather than listing all of them.
What costs marks
The idea: All four are about evidence.
- Claiming without quoting. Every assertion needs an anchor in the text.
- Confusing tone and mood. Speaker versus reader.
- Naming a device and stopping. Say what it does.
- Summarising instead of analysing. Retelling shows you read it, not that you understood it.