ABSTRACT
The purpose of active and close reading is to learn to read interpretively to pay attention not merely to what an author says but to why he says it in the way that he does. In short, the purpose in reading is not merely trying to recall what happens in a story, for example, but to think about why things happen as they do. With nonfiction, active readers take particular note of an author's choice of words, use of sentence structure, and his or her organization of ideas. Textual analysis is a detailed examination of a particular passage in which one try to determine the authors meaning line by line and sometimes word by word. Thomas Mann, in the extraordinary afterword of his novel, The Making of The Magic Mountain says: he consider it a mistake to think that the author himself is the best judge of his work.
