So, close reading: you’ve come up with an abstract and you’ve outlined a thesis. Now what?

Now your job is to walk the audience through your reading of the text. You’ll need to use evidence from the text to demonstrate how the text “works” to support your thesis—in this case, whether Magneto is right, wrong, or somewhere in between. In other words, show the audience how they will have to read the text in order to come to the same conclusion about it as you. Many of the key literary terms we’ve discussed in class so far will be relevant here.

The trick is not to just find lots of little examples that support your thesis, but to give close attention to one or two important passages that are “generalizable.” This means that you’ll want to find representative passages that demonstrate something that is true throughout the text as a whole. Close readers prefer quality over quantity.

(Again, we’ll need to willfully forget the “five-paragraph essay,” which requires you to find lots of little examples that back up your thesis. In a close reading, you don’t want to just point out lots of passages that support your claims, but rather to deeply engage with one or a few passages to show exactly why your argument is correct.)

Let’s give this a try. Continue working in your groups from last week and try to draft one or two body paragraphs building from your abstracts. (Treat your previous abstracts like an introductory paragraph.) Post your results here!