Congratulations to Milly in Year 12 who has been Highly Commended in the English and Media Centre’s ‘Close Reading’ competition. Entrants were challenged to write a 500-word close reading of the passage from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë in a competition which received a record number of entries this year.

We asked Milly about the competition and what is ‘close reading?’

What motivated you to enter the competition?

Milly: Miss Silvester had told my English enrichment class about it and I decided to have a go given that it would be good practice for my upcoming English course work which is also a piece of close reading. I felt that given it was my first time writing such a thing, I had nothing to lose!

What is close reading?

Milly: Close reading is the act of taking an extract of a piece of writing, and analysing the techniques and content of the writing. The act of close reading helps a reader to discover the exact techniques and form used by the writer, in order to fully appreciate the text as a whole. You can look at things such as the structure of a piece of literature, specific imagery used, what tone the writer creates through these, and how it links to the rest of their work.

What was tricky about writing it?

Milly: I had to work really hard to engage with the extract given, and since I had never written a piece of close reading this meant writing in a style that I did not know much about, and thinking in a slightly different way than I was used to. Instead of taking the piece of the novel as a whole, I had to really closely analyse each word and paragraph to identify intentional techniques used by the author to shape the extract in a particular way. I had never read the book (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte) and so I actually had to read it first so that I had a better understanding of the wider context as well.

What did you learn?

Milly: I learnt a lot from entering the competition. I learnt how to identify certain techniques used by writers, and also how to look at and explain the effects of different structures of writing. I also gained some confidence in the skill, and became better at engaging the more analytical side of my brain!

The competition judge commented that:

‘I was also asked to identify any entries that deserved to be ‘Highly Commended’, if I thought there were some who merited this, but no number was specified. I identified four entries in this category, a compact group running close behind the leaders, and deserving extra credit and recognition…. what I liked most about the shortlist as a whole was the ‘joined up’ quality of the responses to the passage. The students didn’t just identify literary tropes or explain isolated details – they joined up the dots of individual points to build a ‘reading’ of the passage. They were confident in using the technical terms associated with close reading, but not over-awed by them, so that they were integrated into lively and fluent accounts of the significance and power of the text.’

Please see here for Milly’s excellent entry.