Close Reading Leads to Clear Writing
In a previous post I urged you to be the editor in chief. Print the draft. Buy a red pen. Cut what isn’t yours.
This type of heavy editing is possible only with close reading. Close reading leads to clear writing.
You can’t edit what you haven’t actually read. And most of us aren’t reading anymore, we’re just scanning. We take a quick glance, it looks fine, we hit send.
That’s not editing. That’s forwarding with extra steps.
Close Reading Comes from Grace
Close reading isn’t my phrase. It comes from Grace Aldridge Foster, one of our instructors at The BRIEF Lab, who wrote a piece for Forbes this summer about English majors becoming indispensable in the age of AI.
She teaches BRIEF Essentials and BRIEF Writing Essentials for us, and co-developed our SITREP Storytelling course. When she posted the article on LinkedIn, it stopped me. I read it twice, which is the whole point.
Her definition is the one to hold onto:
Close reading is sustained attention to a text combined with critical thinking about it.
She calls it a discrete skill. It’s not a personality trait or a preference. It’s something you build, the way you build anything — by doing it badly for a while until you don’t.
I was an English major. In the first few years of my career I couldn’t figure out what that was good for. You major in English and people ask what you’re going to do with it. I liked it. I enjoyed it, but I didn’t know where it fit.
It turns out what I was doing in those library chairs was the training. Reading Shakespeare and Chaucer and sitting with sentences until I understood why they were built that way and what they were trying to convey. Word choice. Why “this” word instead of “that” one. Sound. Alliteration. Repetition. Syntax. Style. Do it long enough and you start admiring the decisions a writer makes and then you start making decisions of your own.
The Risk: Bland Writing That Sounds Good
An AI tool can make everyone grammatically correct. It is now almost impossible to produce writing with obvious errors in it. I wrote a whole chapter on this in Quiet Works. The machine hands you the best first-draft you’ve ever written. It looks good. It sounds good. And the writing isn’t wrong, it’s just smooth and easy.
A busy person scans it, sees nothing objectionable, and passes it along. Do that at your own peril. What you’ve forwarded is what people are starting to call AI Slop: Fluent, competent, and carrying no unique character at all.
The comparison I keep coming back to: It sounds like music, but it’s not. There are no lyrics. The song doesn’t say anything. It’s a love song poorly written but professionally produced and if you’re only half-listening, you’d never know.
So here’s the rule:
Just because it sounds good doesn’t mean it’s actually good.
Don’t scan. Read it closely, and critique it.
Four Practices That Make You a Close Reader
- Slow down. This is difficult and it’s first for a reason. Most people read in a hurry, which means most people never get past the surface. The payoff for patience is that you see what everyone else missed. In Noise I wrote about how much is competing for your attention. In Quiet Works I wrote about what becomes possible when you reclaim your attention. Close reading is exactly that work.
- Be critical, sentence by sentence. Re-read the line. Then ask: Is that the right word? Is that the right order? Is it too long? Too short? What actually needs to be said here? Word by word, sentence by sentence. Mark the margins as you go.
- Move things around. I worked with an editor once who reorganized sentences freely; not because the grammar was wrong, but because he was critical about the structure of an idea. AI builds structure generically. It will be correct, but it will rarely be the best, and often it isn’t even good. Structure is a judgment call, and judgment is yours.
- Extract the insight or admit there isn’t one. Read with a purpose. What point is being made here? Sometimes you’ll do the close reading and find nothing underneath. Acknowledge that, and rewrite it rather than passing along something that says nothing in a pleasant tone.
Go Read Great Writing
I keep a short list. Yours will be different, and it should be:
- E.B. White: If you read one thing on this list, read his collected essays.
- C.S. Lewis: I’d read anything he wrote.
- Ernest Hemingway: Famous for what he leaves out.
- Whatever you already consider great: Read again and read slowly.
The goal is calibration. You need a working sense of what great actually sounds like; otherwise, you have no standard against which to judge any writing and a fluent AI draft will always sound good enough.
Develop An Eye for Excellence
Practice close reading and develop an eye for excellence.
When everyone around you is passing off good-sounding writing as good writing, you’ll be the one who does better. As a writer. As a reader. As the person in the room who says, “This doesn’t say anything yet.”
Your role with AI requires discipline and a decision to slow down when nothing around you is slowing down. Nobody is going to give you permission.
Lean on AI to write with you, not for you. The reading is still yours.
Work With Us
If your team is producing more writing and catching less of what’s wrong with it, that’s a skills gap, and it’s a fixable one.
- BRIEF Writing Essentials teaches TOWER — think, organize, write, edit, rewrite — the method that turns close reading into clear writing.
- SITREP Storytelling, developed by Grace Aldridge Foster, teaches you to structure what you’ve found so other people can act on it.
- BRIEF Essentials covers the basics: updates, briefings, meetings, and conversations.
Visit thebrieflab.com to talk with our team about training your people to read closely, think critically, and write like themselves. And read Grace’s article. Slowly.
Joseph McCormack first shared these ideas in the Just Saying podcast Ep. 402: Close reading as the bridge to clear writing