Close reading can seem like a complicated or specialized academic skill – but the fact is that we all do close reading every single day! We all read “between the lines” of emails, books, movies, and ...

If you have not been assigned a passage or poem, then you must select a text and a specific passage. Limit your selection to a paragraph or two at the most. In some cases, a sentence or two (or a few ...

Iwas an English major in college, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t understand why I should pay to study literature when I knew how to read and could do so more happily on my own time. Like many others, ...

Lindsey Ellefson is Lifehacker’s Features Editor. She currently covers study and productivity hacks, as well as household and digital decluttering, and oversees the freelancers on the sex and ...

W hen I was an undergraduate at Amherst College, it was a rite of passage for all English majors to discover that they had entirely misunderstood Robert Frost’s most famous poem “The Road Not Taken” ( ...

Hollowed out. That’s how I frequently described West Virginia University during the nine years I worked there before leaving this summer. There was a library, but it bought fewer and fewer books. The ...