What are some things I can look for when close-reading a text?

Context: What immediately surrounds the language you are analyzing? For a longer work, how is the passage situated in the work? What comes before or after it? How do contexts outside the text affect meaning?

Word choice: Is it simple or difficult? How are significant words placed in the poem or passage? How do the words reflect or reinforce the meaning?

Figurative language: look at the use of imagery, metaphor, simile, analogy, metonymy, synecdoche, allegory, personification, etc. What kind of imagery do you notice? How does this use of figurative language affect the poem or passage? Do certain metaphors or ideas recur? Do they change? How might repetition of or changes in imagery or figures be significant?

Repetition (e.g., of words, images, sounds): how does repetition affect your reading of the poem or passage? What patterns of repetition occur? How are these connected? Why and to what effect?

Other types of language play: how do rhyme, rhythm, caesura, alliteration, assonance, hyperbole, onomatopoeia, etc., contribute to the sense of the poem or passage?

Ambiguity: what words are used ambiguously and what are their multiple meanings? What is the impact of these meanings on the poem or passage? How will you interpret the poem or passage in light of the ambiguity you find?

Syntax: how does the placement of elements in a sentence or phrase, or word order in a line work in the poem or passage? Consider the use of poetic techniques such as enjambment, parallelism, or end-stopped lines in relation to the syntax of the poem or passage.

Style: does the text have short, choppy sentences or long complex ones? What about the emotional tenor, tone, irony, or humor. How does the style affect your reading of the poem or passage?

Dialogue: do characters use slang or highly formal language? What do they reveal about themselves or their relationships with others through their dialogue?

Subtext: What assumptions, implicit or explicit, inform the passage? What are the implications of these assumptions? How do they affect your understanding of the text?

Adapted from A Quick Guide to Close Reading, Baruch College