Reading: Description Analysis, Reflection, and Log Entries

Student’s Name
Professor
Course
Date
Close Reading Report
1 Description and Analysis
At the start of the semester, I had a lot of problems in reading closely and writing down the concepts obtained from the read books. I first assumed that close reading is the same as the normal skimming or quick reading of materials given. I would, therefore, read without a pencil or marker in my hand. I assumed that it was not that important to jot down the crucial texts or themes gotten from the text. As the course continues by, I started learning key concepts that would help me fill in the reading logs, and also capture important phrases from the texts. I, therefore, use a pencil to annotate the read texts. This helped greatly in remembering most of the keywords and themes entailed in the book. I then started to understand the concept of close reading, which is, to read to understand the book into details, not just merely skimming through the book to get one or a few concepts detailed.
The contents in my log entries changed continuously as I started learning the concepts of close reading. One, I first started jotting down the reading goals in the entries. I would write information like, what do I want to gain from chapter 1, paragraph 5? What are the lessons in part 3 of the book? This approach, therefore, slowed down my reading pace. At first, I was a quick reader who would take the shortest time possible to complete a book. However, with the detailed log entries, my reading pace has slowed because I take a lot of time to analyze the given text, aiming to get all the information entailed in the book. In my entries, I usually talk about the main features of the characters, lessons learned from a given paragraph, the connection between a particular chapter in the book with the preceding chapters. My entries have, therefore, changed over the past weeks. As mentioned, in the first weeks, I focused more on completing the assigned readings rather than getting more detailed information in the texts. As a result, I would first write essays in the form of a book review, sometimes, the drafts did not completely follow the requirements or the information of the given book.
There are several recurring questions evident throughout my entries, for example, on February the 21st,2020, I noted; what do I learn from paragraph 1 of chapter 3 in the texts? Are there new things that the author wants us the readers to learn from this paragraph?...