Getting an A on an English Paper

Jack Lynch,
Rutgers University – Newark

Close Reading

An English teacher's heart will go pitter-pat whenever he or she sees close engagement with the language of the text.

That means reading every word: it's not enough to have a vague sense of the plot. Maybe that sounds obvious, but few people pay serious attention to the words that make up every work of literature. Remember, English papers aren't about the real world; they're about representations of the world in language. Words are all we have to work with, and you have to pay attention to them.

The problem's most acute in poetry. Here, for instance, is the opening of Gray's famous "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard":

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
   The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
   And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

That's usually a dismissive rhetorical question, with the implication, "Why is that nasty old author making my life difficult when he could have said it simply?" But in fact "Why didn't he just say that?" can be a great question, and you should learn to take it seriously. Why did he say it in the denser way? Answer that, and you're on your way to a good thesis. (Hint: with good writers, the answer is almost never "Because he had to rhyme" or "Because he couldn't do it any better.")

An incomplete list of things to look for:

• Diction. Diction means word choice. In English, we usually have a choice of several ways of saying more or less the same thing: see and observe and notice and spot; overweight and portly and fat; have intercourse with, make love to, and fuck. Notice that they're never perfectly interchangeable: some are formal, some are euphemistic, some are clinical, some are vulgar. Pay attention to similar words authors might have used, and try to figure out why they chose as they did.
• Word Order. Most declarative sentences and clauses in Modern English (since about 1500) follow the word order subject — verb — object. Adjectives tend to come before nouns, adverbs usually come before verbs or adjectives. You know all that. If a poet departs from standard English word order, consider whether it's important. (It's not always, but usually.)
• Verb Forms. Most narratives are told in the past tense, active voice, and are usually in either the first person ("I") or the third ("he," "she," "they"). But not always, and not consistently. What might it mean if an author relies on the passive voice? Why is this narrative written in the present tense? Teach yourself to look for these things. (Pay particular attention when they change. If a work suddenly switches from the past tense to the present, or if a work filled with the active voice begins to rely on the passive, or a third-person narrative changes to first, it's almost certainly important.)
• Point of View. Narratives have to be told from some point of view: the narrator might be the central character in the work (as in David Copperfield, narrated by David himself); he or she might be a secondary character in the work (as in The Great Gatsby, narrated by Nick Carraway); or the narrator may be "omniscient" (as in Pride and Prejudice, narrated by someone not in the story and able to tell what happened to all the characters). Some works mix things up, telling different things from different points of view (as in As I Lay Dying, where different chapters are told from the point of view of different characters.) Narrators might also be reliable — readers are expected to take their word for everything — or unreliable — readers have reasons to doubt the narrator is telling the story "straight." Try to stay conscious of these things. Often there's nothing to say about them, but sometimes they really pay off. Look especially for changes in the point of view: if a narrative has been described from the point of view of one character all along, and it suddenly shifts to someone else, that's almost certainly worth thinking about.
• Metaphors. Metaphors — the likening of one thing to another — are much more common than most casual readers realize. Here's a passage from chapter 12 of The Scarlet Letter: "It was an obscure night in early May. An unwearied pall of cloud muffled the whole expanse of sky from zenith to horizon." The word pall here means "covering" — he's just talking about cloud-cover. But a pall is actually a piece of velvet used to cover a coffin: think about the implications, then, of likening clouds to a shroud. Metaphors are often lurking in the literal meanings or etymological origins of common words that don't seem metaphorical at all. Disaster, for instance, comes from the words for "bad star," on the assumption that the heavens influence things on earth: it's a metaphor from astronomy. Ardent, meaning "passionate," comes from the Latin word ardere, "to burn," and therefore originally meant something like "burning with passion." Most people who use ardent aren't thinking of fire, but some — including many good poets — are. Pay attention to such things.

Here's a useful exercise: take an important sentence or two in the work you're analyzing, and look up every word in the Oxford English Dictionary. (Okay, if you're in a hurry, you have my permisison to skip the and is.) Paradise Lost uses the word individual: what did it mean when Milton wrote? What does Frances Burney mean when she writes, "We have been a shopping, as Mrs. Mirvan calls it"? Is the name of the prodigiously endowed "Dick" in the pornographic novel Fanny Hill (1759) a dirty joke, or just a coincidence? The OED will let you know.

Learning to read closely, with attention to the history of words and the meanings lurking in their etymologies and connotations, will go a long way toward making your paper solid. For starters, it helps you avoid the awful problem of generalization. And individual words aren't the only thing to study carefully. Unusual word-order, for instance, is almost always significant. Shifts in person, number, or tense may be loaded with meaning.

The deeper you dig into the text, the more things you'll find. So keep digging, and don't be content with a surface-level reading.