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After reading a poem entitled "The Body as Weaopn, as Inspiration" by Paul Martinez-Pompa, a student composed a blog post to analyze it. She wrote, "The author seemed to focus on the tragedy of the incident, using words like maimed, survived, retaliation, etc. He or she definitely had a purpose to each and every word chosen in this poem." After her close reading, she was able to note how important diction seemed to the author. To draw this conclusion, she read the poem, noticed an important aspect of it, and explained the analysis of it to readers. The rest of this blog post tries to further uncover the meaning of the poem through a careful close reading of it.

 

Excerpt from a Wordpress blog post on January 29th.

Examples

Analysis papers

Throughout high school and college, you will be asked to close read sources and write a paper about your analysis. Close reading simply means that you read your source very carefully to dissect its true meaning. It is an essential part of writing an analysis paper. After this first step, you can move on to crafting an essay to explain your analyses of a source.

Song lyrics are another media that can be closely read. The author of "Love in a Close Reading: Analyzing Ed Sheeran’s 'U.N.I.'" chose to analyze a song for her essay. She wrote, "Although the song starts off about a person who is missing, the protagonist doesn’t seem too torn up about it because Sheeran sings, 'And I don’t get waves of missing you anymore.' However, in the fourth line of the song, Sheeran modifies what he truly meant about waves by singing about the 'tsunami tides' of tears in the protagonist’s eyes. This extreme exaggeration highlights how much the girl is missed. Because of how Sheeran phrases these lines, audience members at first don’t realize that the protagonist misses this girl. However, it is evident that he misses her greatly since his tears are comparable to a tsunami. These lines in the first stanza help to establish the feelings for the rest of the song since Sheeran sets up the protagonist in a way that will allow him to explain other facets of a breakup." This is an effective analysis because the author highlights the importance of Sheeran's word choice. She also explains how the beginning part of the song will come into play in the future. In her essay, she aims to uncover the true meaning of the song through her analysis.

 

Excerpt from Inquiry One.

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