Close Reading of Literary Nonfiction: The Three-column Journal

The Common Core State Standards have placed more emphasis on the close reading of all texts, and have made a point of increasing the use of nonfiction in secondary English classrooms. In this article, the author describes an approach for implementing close reading of literary nonfiction. The approach comes from a small-scale classroom-based research study that revealed statistically significant gains on the subtest measuring analysis of literature. After defining close reading and discussing how and why instructional methods differ, based on elements of analysis within fiction and nonfiction, the author describes the close reading approach using student samples. The approach described in detail is a three-column journal used for guiding students in the close reading of literary nonfiction.