When reading fiction, you're probably focused on finding out what happens in the story and how it ends. when you read a work of fiction for a literature class, however, you need to go beyond the first surface reading. what is your approach to reading literature for a class? have you tried a close reading of a fictional text? we haven’t really discussed an approach to close reading yet, so think about what you do now. what reading techniques do you use when you try to go beyond the surface story to really understand the layers of meaning in a work of fiction? write your response in two to three paragraphs.

When I read fiction simply for pleasure, I read the story once. I'm eager to know what happens in the story and what happens to the characters, so reading about the events in their lives and how the story ends is what matters to me. Sometimes, if the reading is slow or if I feel like a writer is providing too much detail, I even skip sections to just find out what finally happens. When I really like a story or a book, even if I’ve read it for fun, I'll reread it. For example, I’ve read J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye three or four times from start to end.

When I read something for a literature class, I usually read the text first from beginning to end just to know what the work is about. When I don’t understand a word or a phrase, I look it up in the dictionary. Some stories that I have to read for my class are quite complex, so I usually have to reread them a few times to really understand what the writer is conveying. On my second (and sometimes third) reading, I start making notes about certain characters and events in the story. I really enjoy how writers develop characters and how good writers can make different characters all sound so different, as though the same person hasn’t conceived of them. That aspect of stories is why I pay a lot of attention to character descriptions and dialogue. Someday, if I become a writer, I hope to have the versatility to give each of my characters a unique voice as well. Also, if I can’t make a connection between two parts of the story, I try to go back and read both parts again to try and understand the connection. I also look for deeper, connotative meanings that go beyond the basic meanings of certain words used in the work.

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