Journal 2

In my opinion, a close reading is an in-depth examination of a certain text. To perform an effective close reading, one must focus solely on the text itself and pay attention to every detail. One must take of note of the author's voice, tone, mood, thesis, word choice, syntax and imagery as well as any other notable literary characteristic. All of these tools give the reader an insight into what the author is trying to say. In this class, I am doing a close reading on a Dr. Seuss book called Oh, The Places You'll Go. In this book I am learning a lot about how difficult it is to avoid gender stereotypes when composing a text. Dr. Seuss clearly intended this book to be as gender neutral as possible but still was unable to fully avoid these stereotypes. Although close reading do require a great deal of energy and involvement, they provide insight into the text that is often looked over by an untrained reader.