VCE English

What inference is

A text almost never states everything it means. Inferential reading is the habit of working out what is implied: what a character feels but does not say, what a narrator is leaving out, what a writer wants the reader to conclude from an arrangement of events. The reader's conclusions have to rest on something in the text, so an inference is different from a guess. A useful test is whether another reader, shown the same words, could follow the path from the evidence to the conclusion.

Take a short invented line: "Marguerite set two cups on the table, then put one back." Nothing in it says that someone has died, left or will not be coming. The reader infers loss from the small action, and from what the pairing of cups usually means in a household. The inference works because it begins with a detail, adds knowledge about how people live, and ends with a claim about meaning. Written out as a chain, it reads: detail, what the detail usually signals, what that suggests here.

Several kinds of evidence support an inference, and a strong reader uses more than one at a time.

• What a character does, including what they avoid doing.
• What is said, and what is said badly, late or not at all.
• Details of setting that act as a mood or a comment on a character.
• The order in which events are told, and what is held back.
• Repeated words, images or objects.
• The difference between what a narrator claims and what the events show.

Close reading

Close reading means slowing down and treating a short passage as something made. The reader steps back from the story for a moment and attends to vocabulary, sentence shape, punctuation, and the order of information. The aim is to find the patterns that produce the meaning and then explain how they produce it.

A workable routine for a passage of one or two paragraphs:

1. Read it once for the story, so that you know what happens and who is speaking.
2. Read it again and mark words that are doing unusual work: verbs that are stronger than they need to be, adjectives that carry judgement, nouns repeated or varied.
3. Mark where the sentence length or shape changes, and where the punctuation changes the pace.
4. Mark any shift: of time, of place, of speaker, of tone.
5. Ask what the passage does within the whole text. A passage that opens a text, closes a chapter or turns a relationship is usually carrying a larger idea.
6. Write a one-sentence claim about what the passage shows, and keep the details that support it.

Patterns and breaks

A single word is rarely enough to build an argument on. A pattern is: the same sort of image used three times across a chapter, a series of verbs that all suggest confinement, a run of long sentences that then breaks into one blunt one. Breaks matter as much as patterns. When a text that has been formal suddenly uses plain speech, or a narrator who has been calm becomes fragmentary, the change is itself a piece of evidence.

Reading for effect, not for labels

Naming a technique is a starting point and never the end of an observation. Saying that a passage uses a simile is an identification. Saying that a simile comparing a father's silence to a closed door makes his absence feel deliberate and exclusionary, and so shapes the reader's sympathy for the child, is analysis. The movement is always from feature, to effect, to the idea the effect supports.

Annotating while you read

Annotation turns reading into a record that can be used later. A few habits make notes more useful.

• Mark a quotation only when you can say why it matters, even in a few words in the margin.
• Write short labels that name the idea ("trust breaking", "belonging as a performance") rather than copying the plot.
• Keep a running list of the ideas that keep returning, and next to each one a handful of places where it appears.
• Note where a character's view and the text's view seem to differ. A narrator who admires a character the events criticise gives the reader something to work with.
• Mark moments of change: in a relationship, in a character's understanding, in the tone.

When the text is a film, annotation records the visual and sound choices as well: shot distance, lighting, music, the length of a shot, what is in the frame and what is cut. Reading a film closely means describing what the camera is doing with the same care as a reader describes a sentence.

From reading to writing

Close reading is the raw material of an analytical response. Writers who annotate well can find, at short notice, three or four moments that show an idea at different stages of a text, and can say what each moment adds. Writers who have only a plot summary tend to retell events when the task is to explain meaning. Building the habit of asking "what is this doing, and why here" for every marked passage is the single most direct way to avoid that.

Inferences also need to be proportionate. A reading is stronger when it explains many details at once and weaker when it depends on one phrase pushed a long way. If an interpretation needs a detail to be read in a way the rest of the text does not support, it is worth looking for a reading that fits more of what is on the page.

Reading as the text positions you

Authors shape how a reader responds. A text can invite sympathy for a character through access to their thoughts, or distance through an observing narrator. It can reward a reader for noticing irony, or ask the reader to share a character's blind spot. Inferential reading includes noticing this positioning, and asking what a reader is being asked to feel, to doubt, or to judge at each stage. Different readers, in different times and places, may respond differently, and an analysis that recognises this is more careful than one that treats a single response as the only possible one.