Close reading. In literary criticism, close reading is the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of a text. A close reading emphasizes the single and the particular over the general, effected by close attention to individual words, the syntax, and the order in which the sentences unfold ideas, as the reader scans the line of text. In contemporary English practice, the technique of close reading was pioneered by I. A. Richards and his student William Empson; close reading then was technically dev