We are English professors who stumbled into a debate about high school pedagogy. We wrote a book to help college instructors teach close reading, the fundamental skill of literary studies. And then, ...

The invention of close reading. By transforming quotations into evidence, close reading served as way to turn postwar criticism into a specialized knowledge. But what if we treated it more as an art ...

There are a lot of things that have improved over the past 50 years, but are still far from perfect: Car safety. Solar power uptake. Scores of medical procedures. Add reading comprehension instruction ...

Reading is, in some sense, the foundational act of most college learning: it is the place where our students come into contact with new concepts, new horizons, and unsettling ideas; where they find ...

To the editor: In 1970, I was a student teacher and then a second-grade teacher in New York. I later became a learning and reading specialist and taught the teachers. Throughout my training, I learned ...

W hen I was an undergraduate at Amherst College, it was a rite of passage for all English majors to discover that they had entirely misunderstood Robert Frost’s most famous poem “The Road Not Taken” ( ...

In the 21st century, the practice of close reading has become synonymous with approaching a book as an artifact to decode—the idea that the blue curtains can never just be blue curtains. In Close ...