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free guidance notes on writing skills and English Language, sample pages, How-to guides, and study resources

free guidance notes on writing skills and English Language, sample pages, How-to guides, and study resources

Web Essay 1 – Contents page

November 23, 2009 by Roy Johnson

This essay comes from a short first year undergraduate course on the history of the Internet. The course had a couple of face-to-face seminar meetings, but was mainly taught on line. Coursework essays [US – term papers] were submitted in the form of ‘web essays’. Students were asked to create pages with hyperlinks, and although marks were given principally for the content of the essay, the final grade also took into account their web design skills.

Assignment question

The Internet has expanded very rapidly in the years between 1990 and 2000, but its origins go back to the post-war years.

Discuss the earlier phases of the development of the Net, and in particular consider the outstanding figures who have made significant technological contributions. Does any one of them seem to warrant the description of ‘creator of the Internet’?

Web Essay

Student: James Higginson

Course: An Introduction to the Internet

Introduction

What is the Internet?

Internet evolution

Father of the Internet?

Assignment resources

Plan for this assignment

Definition of terms

Tutor comment

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Introduction – What is the Internet? – Internet evolution – Father of the Internet
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Web Essay 2 – Introduction

November 23, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Student: James Higginson
Course: An Introduction to the Internet

Introduction
It is very true that the world’s media and Internet users are beginning
to label specific individuals as the ‘father of the internet’. Indeed, whilst
researching this assignment, there were no less than 4,000 matches on a web search engine for the phrase “father of the internet”, and suggestions ranging from Marconi (inventor of the telephone) to Al Gore (Presidential Candidate in the U.S.A.). But what do these people mean when using the term ‘father of the Internet’, are they talking about an inventor, a guardian or even promoter. The Oxford Dictionary of Current English, defines the word ‘father’ to be:

Forefather; founder or originator; early leader;

Through detailing the historical development of the Internet in the
following sections, I hope to ascertain which people have a claim to be the ‘father of the internet.’

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Web Essay 3 – What is the Internet?

November 23, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Student: James Higginson
Course: An Introduction to the Internet

What is the Internet?

There are many different definitions of the Internet and many people
often confuse the Internet with some of the applications, which run on it, such as E-Mail, World Wide Web and File Transfer Protocol (FTP).

So what is the Internet? In general terms, the Internet is a system of
computer networks, a network or networks that allow users of the Internet to exchange information, files or even talk directly to users of other computers around the world, through the use of set protocols.

To give you an indication of the size of the Internet, the following map
shows the number of hosts on the Internet throughout the world as at July 1999.

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Web Essay 4 – Internet evolution

November 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Student: James Higginson
Course: An Introduction to the Internet

The Internet was not an overnight development, it has evolved over thirty years and can be traced back to the first computer networking projects, the key developments & personalities of which will be explained in this section.

Following the launch of Sputnik (the first artificial earth satellite) by the USSR in 1957, the US Department of Defense formed the Advanced Projects Research Agency (ARPA) to establish a lead in world technology for the USA.

The first head of this organisation was J.C.R. Licklider, who wrote a series of memos in 1962 discussing his ideas of a “Galactic Network”, a global set of computers that were interconnected and allowed users to access data and programs from any site. He promoted his networking theory to his successors at ARPA, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor and Lawrence G Roberts.

In 1965, Lawrence Roberts directly connected a TX-2 computer at MIT in Massachusetts to a Q-32 computer in California via a dedicated phone line. This experiment was the first-ever Wide Area Network (WAN), (the first Local Area Network (LAN) was developed some years later by Bob Metcalfe at Xerox PARC, using the Ethernet protocol, which is probably the dominant network technology on today’s Internet).

The experiment proved that time-sharing computers could network but it also proved that the circuit switching was not adequate and he approached ARPA to develop the computer network concept further. The result was his plan for the ARPANET, a number of individual computers connected by leased lines using packet switching. Roberts had been convinced on the theory of using packet switching by Leonard Kleinrock, who wrote the first paper on packet-switching theory in 1961, although three independent bodies worked on this concept, the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), RAND and MIT.

The first four nodes of ARPANET were at UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara and University of Utah and these formed the initial ARPANET in 1969. The Network Working Group, headed by Steve Crocker, finished the initial ARPANET Host-to-Host protocol in 1970 which was called the Network Control Protocol (NCP). The implementation of this protocol enabled the network users to develop applications.

Bob Kahn, who had been working at Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN), the company which had built the Interface Message Processors (IMPs) of the ARPANET, posed the problem of how computers could interwork without any knowledge of the characteristics of the underlying networks as there were more than one packet switched network. Bob Kahn employed the skills of Vint Cerf (previously involved in the design of NCP and the measurement of ARPANET) to establish a solution to getting these to “internetwork”. They concluded that the following key features were needed:

Using computers as gateways or routers between different networks
Making hosts responsible for end-to-end transmission of packets together with error correction and retransmission if necessary
Devising the protocols necessary to make the first two points happen

In 1974 Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf published “A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection” which specified the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). This new protocol, TCP, was eventually split into Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) to make it even more efficient. In the early 1980s, TCP/IP was established as the protocols on the ARPANET, replacing the NCP.

Through the 1980’s ARPANET was revised, and new networks were established including NSFNET, but TCP/IP was essential to them all. More and more networks have interconnected to form the Internet. Vint Cerf has stated in an online interview:

“Today, there are an unknown number of networks interconnected to form the Internet – certainly in excess of 200,000 around the world and likely more than that. There are at least 60 million computers on the Internet and possibly as many as 200 Million.”

As the Internet and its capabilities has developed, more protocols have been added in a layered approach in addition to TCP/IP, such as the Domain Name System (DNS), the email protocols POP3, IMAP, and SMTP) and the World Wide Web protocols (HTTP, HTML, and XML).

One of the keys to the rapid growth of the Internet has been the availability of basic documents and specifications of the protocols. These were available as Requests for Comments (RFCs). Jon Postel acted as the RFC Editor; in addition to his role as director of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, a non-profit body that administers the required protocol number assignments.

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Web Essay 5 – Father of the Internet?

November 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

It could be claimed that J.C.R. Licklider was a forefather of the Internet, as his ideas of a “Galactic Network” do have a resemblance to the current Internet. He promoted the theories of networking to his successors at ARPA, without whose funding the development of ARPANET and hence Internet could be called into question.

Robert Kahn was responsible for the system design of the ARPANET whilst at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN). After joining ARPA, he conceived the idea of open-architecture networking, the underlying principle of the Internet, which led him to co-develop the protocols required to make the Internet a reality, namely TCP/IP.

Through working for Leonard Kleinrock, Vint Cerf helped to develop the host level protocols of the ARPANET and then on software for the Network Measurement Centre, which measured the performance of the ARPANET. His work led him to work with Robert Kahn in co-developing the protocols, TCP/IP.

Jon Postel is often touted as a father of the Internet. Indeed, he had a significant part to play in the development of the Internet, through his control of the Requests for Comments and founder of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

For the Internet to exist there had to be a method of embracing open-architecture networking, this was only possible through the introduction of TCP/IP. I therefore believe that Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf have the strongest claims to be called father(s) of the Internet, In fact Vint Cerf maybe more so, he has continued to nurture and promote the Internet (as any father would do) through his roles as President of the Internet Society (the closest thing the Internet has to a governing body), Chairman of the Internet Societal Task Force and his work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to design an interplanetary Internet. Kahn and Cerf received the U.S. National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in December 1997, for founding and developing the Internet.

However, if we the use concept of Systems Thinking, i.e. looking at the whole, then the development of the Internet has relied on more than just the development of TCP/IP, developments such as packet-switching were vital, the freedom of information provided by Jon Postel enabled rapid growth, and support of Government in providing an envirnoment & funding for it to have been developed. In fact, Vice President of USA, Al Gore, has even claimed his role:

"During my service in the Unites States Congress,
I took the initiative in creating the Internet"

The Internet may have two father figures in Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn but there are many more who have a valid claim to its birth. The media will always look for an inventor or creator, but in this instance there is a whole family who are responsible for the fatherhood of the Internet.

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Web Essay 6 – assignment resources

November 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Student: James Higginson
Course: An Introduction to the Internet

Click HERE to view my plan for this assignment

Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards stay up late – Touchstone Publications – 1998

Katz, John, “Mourning the Father of the Internet” – 27/10/98 –
(visited 30 August 2000)

Rodriguez, Karen, “Plenty deserve credit as ‘father’ of the Internet” – 25/10/99
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/1999/10/25/newscolumn2.html
(visited 30 August 2000)

The Corporation for National Research Initiatives, “Robert E Kahn biography” – 18/08/00
<http://www.cnri.reston.va.us/bios/kahn.html>
(visited 30 August 2000)

Worldcom, “Vinton G Cerf – Personal Prospective”
(visited 30 August 2000)

The Internet Engineering Task Force
<http://www.itef.org>

Vint Cerf & Robert Kahn, “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication” – May 1974 –
(visited 30 August 2000)

The Internet Society (ISOC)
<http://www.isoc.org>

Robert Hobbes’ Zakon, “Hobbes’ Internet Timeline v5.1” – 01/07/00
(visited 30 August 2000)

Worldcom, “Cerfs Up: Internet History”
(visited 30 August 2000)

Whatis.com
<http://www.whatis.com>

Open University – T171 Course Material
<http://www.open.ac.uk>

N.B. I did email Vint Cerf at http://www.worldcom.com to find out if he is comfortable with the title “father of the Internet”. Unfortunately, as of 01/09/2000, I have not received a reply.

Tutor’s note: Vint Cerf’s very generous reply arrived a few days after the assignment went into the Open University’s inflexible assessment system – but I had already given the student extra points for this initiative. Both of us were justified when Vint Cerf’s assessment turned out to be almost identical to the ‘conclusion’ of the assignment.

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Web Essay 7 – essay plan

November 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Essay plan as a mind map

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Web Essay 8 – definition of terms

November 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Student: James Higginson
Course: An Introduction to the Internet

Definitions

WAN
A WAN is a network that covers a large geographical area. Each node in a WAN may be located in a different town. A mainframe or minicomputer will usually be involved somewhere in a WAN.

LAN
A LAN is a network that covers a smaller area than a WAN. Typically a LAN will serve the needs of one institution at one site. For example a university will have their own LAN, as may an individual bank. LANs often connect to other LANs and to WANs to allow communication between them. These interconnected LANs and WANs form a network of networks commonly known as the Internet.

Ethernet
Ethernet is a network protocol for LANs. It operates on a bus network topology. It was developed by Bob Metcalfe at Xerox PARC and is the most popular method of LAN protocol. Its popularity is a result of its reliability, speed and relative cheapness.

Networks
The public telephone network is officially known as the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). While switchboard operators were replaced by mechanical, and later by computerized switching equipment, and optical (glass) fibre has replaced much of the copper wiring, the function of the network is still simply to connect the wires of two telephones (or compatible devices such as fax machines or modems), so that sounds coming from one end are transmitted to the other. This is called a ‘circuit-switched’, or more simply ‘switched’, network architecture.

Circuit Switching
While this system is very reliable, it is also extremely inefficient and expensive because the connection is made at the beginning of a conversation, fax transmission, or modem ‘session’, and is maintained until the connection is terminated – meaning a certain portion of the network is reserved exclusively for that conversation whether or not communication is taking place at the moment. If one party puts down the phone or is silent, or neither computer is sending or receiving data for a period of time (as is the case when using the Internet), that circuit as well as the ‘ports’ on the phone switches between the two devices are still unavailable for other activity even though they are not being used at the moment. Since it is estimated that up to 50% of a typical voice conversation is actually silence, clearly a tremendous amount of network capacity is wasted. (Put another way: a company must build double the network it really needs for a given number of simultaneous calls at double the cost.)

Packet Switching
Packet networks break the digital stream of ones and zeros into chunks of the same length. These chunks, or ‘packets’, are then put in the computer equivalent of an envelope, with some information such as the origin and destination, or ‘addresses’, of the packet, and a serial number that indicates the sequence number of the packet – its ‘place in line’. In the place of switches which merely connect and disconnect circuits, packet networks use routers – computers that read the address of a packet and pass it to another router closer to the destination. At the destination, a few thousandths of a second later, the packets are received, reassembled in the correct order, and converted back into the original message. Here is an illustration of how it works:

Packet Switching – How it works
The routers in a packet-switched network are permanently connected via high-speed lines. This may seem expensive at first sight, but it makes sense economically (and technically) if the network is heavily used, i.e. effectively flooded with packets.

TCP/IP
The Internet works by breaking long messages into smaller chunks called packets which can then be switched through routers until they reach their destinations. The software associated with the TCP/IP family of protocols takes care of the assembly, disassembly and addressing of packets.

Anatomy of a Packet

Essentially, a packet is a string of bits divided into different segments. At its core is a Data segment (the chunk of the original message) which is sometimes referred to as the payload. In order to arrange for the passage of the payload through the Internet, extra information is added to it in the form of headers or (occasionally) trailers

TCP was eventually split into two protocols – one (IP) to handle addressing of packets, the other (TCP) to deal with their assembly and disassembly. The design philosophy behind this was the belief that it was better to have specialised protocols which each did one job and co-operated with one another rather than trying to design one, all-embracing monolithic protocol which tried to do everything.

DNS
The Domain name system (DNS) is the way that internet domain names are
located and translated into Internet Protocol addressess. A domain name is a
meangingful and easy-to-remember “handle” for an internet address.

POP3
POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3) is the most recent version of a standard protocol for receiving e-mail. POP3 is a client/server protocol in which e-mail is received and held for you by your Internet server. Periodically, you (or your client e-mail receiver) check your mail-box on the server and download any mail. POP3 is built into the Netmanage suite of Internet products and one of the most popular e-mail products, Eudora. It’s also built into the Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers.

IMAP
IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) is a standard protocol for accessing e-mail from your local server. IMAP (the latest version is IMAP4) is a client/server protocol in which e-mail is received and held for you by your Internet server. You (or your e-mail client) can view just the heading and the sender of the letter and then decide whether to download the mail. You can also create and manipulate folders or mailboxes on the server, delete messages, or search for certain parts or an entire note. IMAP requires continual access to the server during the time that you are working with your mail.

SMTP
SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is a TCP/IP protocol used in sending and receiving e-mail. However, since it’s limited in its ability to queue messages at the receiving end, it’s usually used with one of two other protocols, POP3 or Internet Message Access Protocol, that let the user save messages in a server mailbox and download them periodically from the server. In other words, users typically use a program that uses SMTP for sending e-mail and either POP3 or IMAP for receiving messages that have been received for them
at their local server.

HTTP
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the set of rules for exchanging files (text, graphic images, sound, video, and other multimedia files) on the World Wide Web. Relative to the TCP/IP suite of protocol, HTTP is an application protocol. Essential concepts that are part of HTTP include (as its name implies) the idea that files can contain references to other files whose selection will elicit additional transfer requests.

HTML
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the set of “markup” symbols or codes inserted in a file intended for display on a World Wide Web browser. The markup tells the Web browser how to display a Web page’s words and images for the user.

XML
XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a flexible way to create common information formats and share both the format and the data on the World Wide Web, intranets, and elsewhere. For example, computer makers might agree on a standard or common way to describe the information about a computer product (processor speed, memory size, and so forth) and then describe the product information format with XML. Such a standard way of describing data would enable a user to send an intelligent agent (a program) to each computer maker’s Web site, gather data, and then make a valid comparison. XML can be used by any individual or group of individuals or companies that wants to share information in a consistent way.

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Web Essay 9 – tutor comment

November 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Student: James Higginson
Course: An Introduction to the Internet

Congratulations on your essay James. It’s a substantial piece of work, and you have done well. I realise that the last few weeks on the course have been tough – and it’s to your credit that you’ve stuck at it.

These are my comments, made as I go through the script. Please bear with me, because I am trying to use the marking software, which is a bit temperamental.

&& – indicates where marks have been gained

** – indicates where marks have been lost

Try to avoid posing your argument in the form of questions. Even if they are answered, they usually have the effect of leading away from the question which has been asked.

Very good that you give full references to all your sources. &&

I liked the definitions of LAN and WAN which you put in as links [which worked well]. This shows your exploiting the potential of HTML. &&

[This is a very small detail] I think the references to your sources might look better as footnotes [with links]. This would leave the web essay itself less ‘cluttered’.

I also liked the fact that you made a well-reasoned attempt to ‘answer the question’ [though I was a little surprised that Donald Davies didn’t get a mention].

Your report/essay is thorough, well-executed, and effective. All the links work, and I liked the way you used the horizontal rule to emphasise the structure.

Your plan is good and shows your clear-thinking skills – &&

Your writing is clear, to-the-point, and ‘objective’ – in just the way which is required for academic work. &&

I am also giving you maximum bonus marks for having emailed Vint Cerf. Even though his reply was too late to go into the web essay, I have seen it in the conference, and I think it is in the spirit of the web that you could add it to your assignment.

You have now completed four essays – which means that there’s only the End of Course Assignment to go. You are heading towards successful completion of the course!

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What is close reading?

September 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a brief guide to advanced reading skills

Close reading – explained

1. Close reading is the most important skill you need for any form of literary studies. It means paying especially close attention to what is printed on the page. It is a much more subtle and complex process than the term might suggest.

2. Close reading means not only reading and understanding the meanings of the individual printed words; it also involves making yourself sensitive to all the nuances and connotations of a language as it is used by skilled writers.

3. This can mean anything from a work’s particular vocabulary, sentence construction, and imagery, to the themes that are being dealt with, the way in which the story is being told, and the view of the world that it offers. It involves almost everything from the smallest linguistic items to the largest issues of literary understanding and judgement.

4. Close reading can be seen as four separate levels of attention which we can bring to the text. Most normal people read without being aware of them, and employ all four simultaneously. The four levels or types of reading become progressively more complex.

Linguistic
You pay especially close attention to the surface linguistic elements of the text – that is, to aspects of vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. You might also note such things as figures of speech or any other features which contribute to the writer’s individual style.
Semantic
You take account at a deeper level of what the words mean – that is, what information they yield up, what meanings they denote and connote.
Structural
You note the possible relationships between words within the text – and this might include items from either the linguistic or semantic types of reading.
Cultural
You note the relationship of any elements of the text to things outside it. These might be other pieces of writing by the same author, or other writings of the same type by different writers. They might be items of social or cultural history, or even other academic disciplines which might seem relevant, such as philosophy or psychology.

5. Close reading is not a skill which can be developed to a sophisticated extent overnight. It requires a lot of practice in the various linguistic and literary disciplines involved – and it requires that you do a lot of reading. The good news is that most people already possess the skills required. They have acquired them automatically through being able to read – even though they haven’t been conscious of doing so.

This is rather like many other things which we learn unconsciously. After all, you don’t need to know the names of your leg muscles in order to walk down the street.

Studying Fiction is an introduction to the basic concepts and technical terms you need when making a study of stories and novels. It shows you how to understand literary analysis by explaining its elements one at a time, then showing them at work in short stories which are reproduced as part of the book. Topics covered include – setting, characters, story, point of view, symbolism, narrators, theme, construction, metaphors, irony, prose style, tone, close reading, and interpretation. The book also contains self-assessment exercises, so you can check your understanding of each topic. It was written by the same author as the guidance notes on this page that you are reading right now.

Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

6. The four types of reading also represent increasingly complex and sophisticated phases in our scrutiny of the text.

Linguistic reading is largely descriptive. We are noting what is in the text and naming its parts for possible use in the next stage of reading.
Semantic reading is cognitive. That is, we need to understand what the words are telling us – both at a surface and maybe at an implicit level.
Structural reading is analytic. We must assess, examine, sift, and judge a large number of items from within the text in their relationships to each other.
Cultural reading is interpretive. We offer judgements on the work in its general relationship to a large body of cultural material outside it.

7. The first and second of these stages are the sorts of activity designated as ‘Beginners’ level; the third takes us to ‘Intermediate’; and the fourth to ‘Advanced’ and beyond.

8. One of the first things you need to acquire for serious literary study is a knowledge of the vocabulary, the technical language, indeed the jargon in which literature is discussed. You need to acquaint yourself with the technical vocabulary of the discipline and then go on to study how its parts work.

9. What follows is a short list of features you might keep in mind whilst reading. They should give you ideas of what to look for. It is just a prompt to help you get under way.

Close reading – Checklist

Grammar
The relationships of the words in sentences
Vocabulary
The author’s choice of individual words
Figures of speech
The rhetorical devices used to give decoration and imaginative expression to literature, such as simile or metaphor
Literary devices
The devices commonly used in literature to give added depth to the work, such as imagery or symbolism
Tone
The author’s attitude to the subject as revealed in the manner of the writing
Style
The author’s particular choice and combination of all these features of writing which creates a recognisable and distinctive manner of writing

Close reading – Example

10. Now here’s an example of close reading in action. The short passage which follows comes from the famous opening to Charles Dickens‘ Bleak House.

11. If you would like to treat this as an interactive exercise, read the passage through a number of times. Make notes, and write down all you can say about what goes to make up its literary ‘quality’. That is, you should scrutinise the passage as closely as possible, name its parts, and say what devices the author is using. Don’t be afraid to list even the most obvious points.

12. If you are not really sure what all this means however, allow yourself a brief glance ahead at the first couple of discussion notes which follow, and then come back to carry on making notes of your own.

13. Don’t worry if you are not sure what name to give to any feature you notice. You will see the technical vocabulary being used in the discussion notes which follow, and this should help you pick up this skill as we go along.

Bleak House

London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

Close reading

14. This is the sort of writing which many people, asked for their first impressions, would say was very ‘descriptive’. But if you looked at it closely enough you will have seen that it is imaginative rather than descriptive. It doesn’t ‘describe what is there’ – but it invents images and impressions. There is as much “it was as if …” material in the extract as there is anything descriptive. What follows is a close reading of the extract, with comments listed in the order that they appear in the extract.

London
This is an abrupt and astonishingly short ‘sentence’ with which to start a six hundred page novel. In fact technically, it is grammatically incomplete, because it does not have a verb or an object. It somehow implies the meaning ‘The scene is London.’

Sentence construction
In fact each of the first four sentences here are ‘incomplete’ in this sense. Dickens is taking liberties with conventional grammar – and obviously he is writing for a literate and fairly sophisticated readership.

Sentence length
These four sentences vary from one word to forty-three words in length. This helps to create entertaining variation and robust flexibility in his prose style.

Michaelmas Term
There are several names (proper nouns) in these sentences, all signalled by capital letters (London, Michaelmas Term, Lord Chancellor, Lincoln’s Inn Hall, November, Holborn Hill). This helps to create the very credible and realistic world Dickens presents in his fiction. We believe that this is the same London which we could visit today. The names also emphasise the very specific and concrete nature of the world he creates.

Michaelmas Term
This occurs in autumn. It comes from the language of the old universities (Oxford and Cambridge) which is shared by the legal profession and the Church.

Lord Chancellor sitting
Here ‘sitting’ is a present participle. The novel is being told in the present tense at this point, which is rather unusual. The effect is to give vividness and immediacy to the story. We are being persuaded that these events are taking place now.

Implacable
This is an unusual and very strong term to describe the weather. It means ‘that which cannot be appeased’. What it reflects is Dickens’s genius for making almost everything in his writing original, striking, and dramatic.

as if
This is the start of his extended simile comparing the muddy streets with the primeval world.

the waters
There is a slight Biblical echo here, which also fits neatly with the idea of an ancient world he is summoning up.

but newly and wonderful
These are slightly archaic expressions. We might normally expect ‘recently’ and ‘astonishing’ but Dickens is selecting his vocabulary to suit the subject – the prehistoric world. ‘Wonderful’ is being used in its original sense of – ‘something we wonder at’.

forty feet long or so
After the very specific ‘forty feet long’, the addition of ‘or so’ introduces a slightly conversational tone and a casual, almost comic effect.

waddling
This reinforces the humorous manner in which Dickens is presenting this Megalosaurus – and note the breadth of his vocabulary in naming the beast with such scientific precision.

like an elephantine lizard
This is another simile, announced by the word ‘like’. Here is Dickens’s skill with language yet again. He converts a ‘large’ noun (‘elephant’) into an adjective (‘elephantine’) and couples it to something which is usually small (‘lizard’) to describe, very appropriately it seems, his Megalosaurus.

up Holborn Hill
There is a distinct contrast, almost a shock here, in this abrupt transition from an imagined prehistoric world and its monsters to the ‘real’ world of Holborn in London.

lowering
This is another present participle, and an unusual verb. It means ‘to sink, descend, or slope downwards’. It comes from a rather ‘poetic’ verbal register, and it has a softness (there are no sharp or harsh sounds in it) which makes it very suitable for describing the movement of smoke.

soft black drizzle
He is comparing the dense smoke (from coal fires) with another form of particularly depressing atmosphere – a drizzle of rain. Notice how he goes on to elaborate the comparison.

as big as full grown snow flakes
The comparison becomes another simile: ‘as big as’. And then ‘full grown’ almost suggests that the snowflakes are human. This is a device much favoured by Dickens: it is called ‘anthropomorphism’ – attributing human qualities or characteristics to things which are themselves inanimate. Then ‘snowflakes’ is a well-observed comparison for an enlarged flake of soot, because they are of similar size and texture. Notice next how Dickens immediately goes on to play with the notion that whilst soot is black, snowflakes are white.

gone into mourning
This reinforces the anthropomorphism. The inanimate world is being brought to life. And of course ‘mourning’ reinforces the atmospheric gloom he is trying to evoke. It also introduces blackness (the colour of mourning) to explain how these snowflakes (actually flakes of soot) might have changed from white to black.

the death of the sun
This is why the flakes have changed colour. And if the sun has died the light and life it brings to earth have also been extinguished – which reinforces the atmosphere of pre-historic darkness he is creating.

15. We will stop at this point. It would in fact be possible to say even more about the extract if we were to relate it to the novel as a whole – but almost everything listed was accessible even if you were reading the passage for the first time.

16. Literary studies are not conducted in such detail all the time, but it is very important that you try to develop the skill of reading as closely as possible. It really is the foundation on which everything else is based.

17. The next point to make about such close reading is that it becomes easier if you get used to the idea of reading and re-reading. The Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov (famous for Lolita) once observed that “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only re-read it”.

18. What he meant by this apparently contradictory remark is that the first time we read a book we are busy absorbing information, and we cannot appreciate all the subtle connexions there may be between its parts – because we don’t yet have the complete picture before us. Only when we read it for a second time (or even better, a third or fourth) are we in a position to assemble and compare the nuances of meaning and the significance of its details in relation to each other.

19. This is why the activity is called ‘close reading’. You should try to get used to the notion of reading and re-reading very carefully, scrupulously, and in great detail.

20. Finally, let’s try to dispel a common misconception. Many people ask, when they first come into contact with close reading: “Doesn’t analysing a piece of work in such detail spoil your enjoyment of it?” The answer to this question is “No – on the contrary – it should enhance it.” The simple fact is that we get more out of a piece of writing if we can appreciate all the subtleties and the intricacies which exist within it. Nabokov also suggested that “In reading, one should notice and fondle the details”.

Sample close reading of Katherine Mansfield’s The Voyage

Sample close reading of Virginia Woolf’s Monday or Tuesday

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