Close reading does not seem to me so hard from the beginning, but after I started working on my second paper it appeared to be very difficult. The most challenging part for me is to analyze. By its definition, analyzing is stating your own opinion and expanding on it based on the evidences presented. Another term close in meaning to analyzing is summarizing, that is where it gets confusing for me. I caught myself thinking and wondering while proofreading my second paper whether I analyzed or summarized instead. At this moment I am struggling to distinguish whether I am summarizing or analyzing. There is obviously a difference between these two terms, but still for me this remains a bit challenging and difficult.
For the second paper I chose “Goodbye to all that”, written by Joan Didion. I think it is a very interesting narrative and there is much to write about. I noticed for instance that after I read the story for the first time I had a notion about what was going on in the narration. Interestingly enough after I read the story a second, third and fourth time my first impression changed and I have now a much clearer idea about the story and the author’s life circumstances.
In order to perform good on this assignment I have to be able to read between the lines and try to analyze the situation in order to attain a clear sense about what the author wrote. Each time I re-read the story every little word made more and more sense to me. This played a key role in understanding the whole picture of the narrative.
Overall it is an interesting project. I am surprised that through this work I was able in a way to compare myself to the author. At the same time I am learning through her experience which is a lot to learn. It has been known that it is better to learn from somebody else’s mistakes rather than from your own.