Higher Close Reading

1. Higher Close Reading Sentence Structure

3. What are the signals we should be looking for? Varying lengths of sentences. Inversion Repetition of a word, clause, phrase or sound. Parallelism of structure Balance Climax Antithesis Punctuation Merely identifying these features is not enough to gain you marks in close reading. COMMENT IS ESSENTIAL

4. Decorating Should Come With a Health Warning� Short Sentences �A mania has swept over the land.� (line 1) �Nonsense.� (line 15) �Believe me, you�ll be noticed.� (line 19) �Lay down your nail-guns, good people.� (line 30-31) We have been used to saying that short sentences Make an impact or emphasise a point. To go further we must look at the context and form a more sophisticated response

5. �A mania has swept over the land.� (line 1) Look at the position of this sentence. What do we call this and what does it do? What comment can we make over and above that it is short and perhaps grabs the readers� attention?

6. �Nonsense.� (line 15) We could comment that this is a minor sentence. We could point out that it has no verb. To gain marks though you need to make a comment about what this sentence is doing in this article at this point. Look at its position. How are you being influenced or manipulated by the writer?

7. Task A Now you try with the following sentences: �Believe me, you�ll be noticed.� (line 19) �Lay down your nail-guns, good people.� (line 30-31)

8. Lists or Series Lists are easily identified but are difficult to make comment on. The list is NOT the commas or semi-colons The list is made up of the items. You must comment specifically on the items NOT the punctuation.

9. It shows scale and scope of the problem faced. You could argue that it builds to a climax � even our family won�t give us any attention. The phrases are parallel � they have the same pattern and start with the same word. It shows scale and scope of the problem faced. You could argue that it builds to a climax � even our family won�t give us any attention. The phrases are parallel � they have the same pattern and start with the same word.

11. REPETITION Though our society has an overabundance of information and material wealth, there�s one thing we never have enough of � attention. Attention from friends who can�t chat because they�re on their way to Habitat; attention from the boss who�d rather we kept to e-mail; attention from family who are always glued to Changing Rooms (lines 8-11) This sentence is given further power by the repeated use of the word ATTENTION. Structurally the idea of attention is important and this was indicated by the previous sentence where the word was highlighted for us.

12. TASK B Look at Lines 1-6 Comment on the effect of each of the lists or series in this paragraph.

13. EXPANSION and EXPLANATION Changing Rooms, Tool Stories, Home Front, you know the drill: take three couples, shuffle them with an interior designer/DIY expert/measly budget, see what sticks. (lines 21-24) The function of the colon is to introduce an explanation. What is the effect?

14. Using �And� at the beginning of a sentence. �And if you thought we had reached saturation point, be warned, more are on the way. � (lines 24-25) Grammatically this should be part of the previous sentence. Why has the writer chosen to make it a new sentence and what impact does it have?

15. Sentence Structure List Series Parallelism Climax/anti-climax Repetition Expansion/explanation Colon/semi-colon Short sentence Minor sentence Balance Antithesis Parenthesis