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Close Reading

Close Reading. Notes from Francine Prose & Reading Like a Writer. Close Reading Notes by Francine Prose. Words = Diction Sentences = Syntax Paragraphs = Unit of Composition Narration = Perspective & Negative Space Character = Characterization Dialogue = Whachoo say?

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Close Reading

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  1. Close Reading Notes from Francine Prose & Reading Like a Writer

  2. Close Reading Notes by Francine Prose Words = Diction Sentences = Syntax Paragraphs = Unit of Composition Narration = Perspective & Negative Space Character = Characterization Dialogue = Whachoo say? Details = Pay attention to technique Gesture = What you do speaks so loudly…

  3. Close Reading Notes by Francine Prose Long before the idea of a writer’s conference was a glimmer in anyone’s eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson. And who could have asked for better teachers: generous, uncritical, blessed with wisdom and genius, as endlessly forgiving as only the dead can be? (3)

  4. Close Reading Notes by Francine Prose Words = Diction Every page was once a blank page, just as every word that appears on it not was not always there, but instead reflects the final result of countless large and small deliberations. All the elements of good writing depend on the writer’s skill in choosing one word instead of another. And what grabs and keeps our interest has everything to do with those choices. (16)

  5. Close Reading Notes by Francine Prose Words = Diction The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind. From Flannery O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ Calling her ‘the grandmother’ at once reduces her to her role in the family, as does the fact that her daughter-in-law is never called anything but “the children’s mother”. At the same time this gives her an archetypal, mythic role that elevates her and keeps us from getting too chummy with this woman whose name we never learn, even as the writer is preparing our hearts to break at the critical moment to which the grandmother’s whole life and the events of the story have led her.

  6. Close Reading Notes by Francine Prose Words = Diction The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind. From Flannery O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~surette/goodman.html link to full text of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor

  7. Close Reading Notes by Francine Prose Words = Diction http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/fiction/ Here is a link to a close reading resource that is accessible through our textbook agreement.

  8. Close Reading Notes by Francine Prose Gesture = What I do speaks so loudly… Gesture… includes small physical actions, often unconscious or semi-reflexive, including what is called body language and excluding larger, more definite or momentous actions. (210)

  9. Close Reading Notes by Francine Prose Gesture = What I do speaks so loudly… Gesture… I would not call picking up a gun and shooting someone a gesture. On the other hand, language, that is, word choice– can function as a gesture: the way certain married people refer to their spouses as him or her is a sort of a gesture communicating possession, intimacy, pride, annoyance, tolerance, or some combination of the above. (210)

  10. Close Reading Notes by Francine Prose Gesture = What I do speaks so loudly… Gesture… Mediocre writing abounds with physical cliches and stock gestures. They fail because they are not descriptions of an individual’s very particular response to a particular event, but rather are a shorthand for common psychic states. He bit his lip, she clenched her fists – our characters are nervous. The cap adjuster is wary and determined, the couple intimate, and so forth. (210)

  11. Close Reading Notes by Francine Prose Gesture = What I do speaks so loudly… Gesture… cliché Her heart pounded. He wrung his hands. Her hands were as cold as ice. His sweet breath was warm against the back of her neck. (210)

  12. Close Reading Notes by Francine Prose Gesture = What I do speaks so loudly… Gesture… Properly used gestures – plausible, in no way stagy or extreme, yet unique and specific – are like windows opening to let us see a person’s soul, his or her secret desires, fears or obsessions, the precise relations between that person and the self, between the self and the world, as well as the complicated emotional, social and historical male-female choreography that is instantly comprehensible, even in these times. (213)

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