Informational Handout 3.2: Close Reading, Annotation, and Craft

Reading to understand a story is different from reading to understand how it was made. The second kind requires slowing down, returning to the same paragraph two or three times, not because you missed something, but because you want to see under it. Most readers move through a text looking for what happens next. A close reader stops to ask how this sentence was built and why the writer built it this way instead of another.

Close reading is the practice of attending to specific language choices: the word, the sentence, the rhythm, the image. Skilled writers make deliberate choices at every level. They choose one word over another, decide how long a sentence will be and where to break it, place a pause for a reason. Close reading treats those choices as meaningful and asks what each one does. A short text read closely will teach you more about craft than a long text read fast.

Annotation is how readers make close reading visible. An annotation is a note written beside a passage that records what a reader notices and questions in their own words. Good annotations name what the writer did and what that choice does to the reader. "This is powerful" is not an annotation. "He uses fell instead of dropped — fell suggests loss of control, not choice" is an annotation. The difference is specificity. A vague response tells you how you felt. A real annotation tells you what caused the feeling and how the writer produced it. Annotation keeps your reading active and forces you to put your observations into language, which is how you find out whether you actually understood what you noticed.

You can annotate on paper, in a digital comment, or by speaking your observations aloud as you read. The method matters less than the habit: stop when something surprises you, and write down why.

Craft refers to the deliberate choices a writer makes at every level of a text to create specific effects. It covers structure, pacing, point of view, tone, and diction. When you read closely and annotate, you are studying how someone built something. A carpenter can walk into a house and see the decisions inside the walls. A close reader does the same thing with a paragraph.

Thomas King is a writer of Cherokee, Greek, and German-American ancestry who spent most of his career in Canada, teaching at the University of Lethbridge and the University of Guelph. He received the Order of Canada in 2004. His novels, short stories, and CBC Massey Lectures are widely read in Canada, and his work is known for using comedy, indirection, and absurdist technique to address serious colonial history. He does not write about these subjects by describing them plainly. He comes at them sideways, and the angle is deliberate.

Absurdist technique involves describing impossible or bizarre events in a matter-of-fact tone, as if they were completely ordinary. The gap between the tone (calm, neutral) and the content (shocking, impossible) is where the meaning lives. In "A Short History of Indians in Canada" (2005), Indians fall from the sky in downtown Toronto and a businessman watches hotel workers sweep them up the way a maintenance crew handles birds hitting a window. The hotel staff know the procedure. They have done this before. Nobody panics. Nothing in the story is realistic, but the argument it makes about settler indifference to Indigenous people is exact. King uses the flatness of the tone to say something that a horrified or outraged tone could not say as precisely. The calm is the point.

Three pages of this story will give you more to annotate than thirty pages of less deliberate writing. Every sentence is a decision. Your job as a reader is to notice the decisions and ask why King made them.