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.

Richard Van Camp is a Tłı̨chǫ Dene writer from Fort Smith, Northwest Territories. He published his first novel, The Lesser Blessed, at twenty-four. He has since written more than thirty books, including novels, children's books, graphic novels, and story collections, and he holds the Order of the Northwest Territories. Gather (2022) collects the stories and interviews he uses when he teaches other people how to tell stories well.

Writers sometimes describe something enormous, death, the sacred, a miracle, using the same plain words they would use to describe a grocery run. That plainness is not a failure of imagination. It is control. When a writer refuses to reach for big, dramatic language at the exact moment a reader expects it, the plainness itself creates the effect. Readers lean in because the writer did not tell them how to feel.

In "Heaven Is Like West Edmonton Mall," a chapter in Gather, Van Camp transcribes an interview with Dënesųłiné (Chipewyan) Elder Maria Brown, who describes a near-death experience. Maria talks about seeing heaven in the same voice she would use to describe an actual trip to the mall: "Heaven is like West Edmonton Mall. Everyone's young there." She lists beautiful clothes, marble floors, people she once knew, in plain, concrete terms, with no poetic reaching. Van Camp makes a second craft choice that matters just as much: he prints Maria's words exactly as she said them, including her own phrasing and code-switching, rather than smoothing them into standard written English. He tells the reader this directly: he transcribed the interview "as true to the original conversation as possible with no words cut." Preserving an Elder's exact voice is a craft decision, not a lesser one than a polished sentence.

As you read, watch for the moments where Van Camp, or Maria, could have reached for bigger language and did not. Mark them. Ask yourself what the plainness does that a more dramatic sentence would not.

A note on language: early in the interview, Van Camp asks Maria, "And you're a Chipewyan Indian?" and she answers, "Yeah." The word appears because it is how Maria spoke, in an interview recorded and transcribed as-is, not because a writer chose it for effect. Notice how differently a word lands depending on who is speaking it and why.