Journal 2

To me, close reading is much more than just glancing at a text or briefly reading it. Close reading is the in depth analysis of the author's meaning. Everything that people write, they write for a reason, and close reading is the attempt to try and understand what the author wanted to say through his writing, and also why they wrote what they wrote. Everyone interprets texts differently when close reading, but as long as they are looking closely at the words the author chose, and thinking about why they chose them, and what this could mean, I feel that they are close reading. I have learned from doing my close reading for Inquiry 1, that a lot of books and movies from my childhood, have subconsciously shaped my views of gender. The books I read and the movies I watched as a kid, had a lot of hidden statements about gender, that I did not notice when just watching them carelessly. It was only after I began to carefully look at what was being said and why, that I started to see these ideas about gender.