Reading Closely for a Purpose

Step 1: Before You Read

Watch the idea first — 63 seconds. Then read on, and try it yourself in the next step.

Close reading is not slow reading. It is reading with a question you are carrying, and what you notice depends entirely on which question that is.

Today’s story

The Last Day of the Pool

A piece of writing about a swimming pool closing. About 300 words.

Step 2: Read the Story

One part at a time. Press Listen, or read it yourself. The tutor reads along with you.

The tutor shows

The Corn Street baths opened in 1908 and closed on a Tuesday in August, and for the last hour they let anybody in for nothing. There were more people in the water that afternoon than there had been on any day Idris could remember, and he had been coming since he was four.

The tiles round the shallow end were the color of weak tea where the water had been for a hundred and sixteen years, and green in the corners nobody could reach with a brush. The high windows threw long bars of light across the surface, and the noise came back off the roof the way it always had, so that everybody sounded like they were shouting from further away than they were.

Why does a purpose change what you notice?

At four o’clock the attendant blew the whistle and everybody got out. Nobody argued about it.

They opened the valve at half past. Idris sat on the edge with his feet in and watched the level drop past the second tile, and then the third, and after a while he could not feel the water any more.

The deep end went last. It took nearly an hour, and by the end there were fourteen people left in the building, standing round the rail and not talking much.

Underneath, where the water had been, there was a drain, a lost pair of goggles, and a two-pence piece.

Somebody said it was a shame. Somebody else said the roof had wanted doing for years.

Idris walked home the long way.

Step 3: The Whole Story

Finish reading with the tutor, and the whole story appears here with its parts named.

Step 4: My Notebook

Finish the story first. Then write down two things you noticed.

Step 5: What You Learned

Reading with no purpose notices whatever is loudest.
A purpose is a question you carry through the text.
Different purposes produce genuinely different readings.

For the grown-up

Close reading is widely taught as reading slowly, which produces slow readers rather than close ones. The active ingredient is the question the reader carries: it decides what is salient, and naming it before starting is what makes a second reading different from a repeat.

Before rereading anything, ask what you are reading it for this time.