Reader response

I have always had a love hate relationship with close readings. The reason for this is because I like when, I do close readings and understand them, but when I have to do a close reading and have no idea what the text is talking about I hate them. However since we went into some details this week in class about close readings, hopefully not knowing what is going on will not happen as much. This week we learned about annotating the text we are reading, look for patterns, to ask questions about the text, and also look for underlying themes and meanings.These tips helped me this week for example when we read the story “Hills like white Elephants” , when I first read this I had no idea what was going on, but when I went back and looked for patterns in the story I found some information that helped me figure out what the story was  about, which was how the man in the story kept saying you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to and how he mentioned a operation needed to be done this lead me to believe the story was about abortion which it was. I liked doing the close reading on this story, but for the other ones we read in class I had a bit more trouble with, like the Lottery, Oates’ story, and the yellow wall paper, I did not really get how to do a close reading with these text, because I felt they were just stories, but then we had the discussion in class and I saw how everyone in the class was talking about the deeper meanings of the stories, which I just did not see.  However I did feel I did a good job with the response part and making connections with some of the stories, for example I connected ‘the Lottery” with a South Park episode. But overall it is clear I still need some work on my close reading skills, but after this week of class, I definitely y feel more comfortable with close readings and how to do them.(358)

http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/164633/condoms-and-ritualistic-sacrifice here's the link to the south park episode that makes fun of the lottery