Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

RRP 5: Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian Close reading! About Close Reading No matter your discipline or career, close reading is a useful skill. Your classes, your work, your government, and even your pastimes require you to read and evaluate something difficult and make sense of it. In general, “close reading” simply means analyzing a text—be it a portion of a novel, a photograph, a short story, a poem, a scholarly essay, an operation manual, a tax form, a television commercial—very carefully, crystallizing main ideas, and then drawing conclusions or making decisions based on your analysis. Close reading relies upon the process of inductive reasoning—the idea is to look at the little pieces and see how they connect to the whole. Close reading is a writing strategy meant to help you gain a better understanding of your reading of a text and to provide you with the necessary textual evidence to support that reading. The goal of any close reading is: an ability to understand the general content of a text even when you don’t understand every word or concept in it. an ability to spot techniques that writers use to get their ideas and feelings across and to explain how they work. an ability to judge whether techniques the writer has used succeed or fail and an ability to compare and contrast the successes and failures of different writers’ techniques. Assignment For this 1-2 pg response paper, perform a close reading of a passage from Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. 1) Begin by choosing a passage that interests you and where you believe textually interesting things are happening. Your passage should be as short as a page or as long as a chapter. It should be coherent as a passage (addressing one event, topic, etc.). Indicate the page numbers of your passage at the top of your response paper (if your pagination does not match mine, indicate chapter and other identifying features). 2) On as separate piece of paper, perform a brainstorming activity according to these instructions: [login to view URL] or [login to view URL] (I suggest looking at both and using the instructions that seem more helpful to you. The first has many more suggestions and prompts.). Keep in mind that some of these questions will be more relevant to your passage than others—you’ll want to focus on those that apply. By the end of your brainstorming, you should be finding patterns—and patterns are what you will want to focus on in #3. 3) Write a 1-2 page response communicating the conclusions you have made in #2. Your response should contain a thesis sentence that is an arguable claim. For this assignment, you can think of the thesis as a statement that sums up what is most important and interesting about your passage and the literary devices within it. You will then use specific evidence to illustrate, support, and explain your findings. Remember, your goal is to show how these small details contribute to the overall meaning of the text.