Keep a pencil near a short passage, but make yourself one rule: never mark every sentence that feels “important.” Instead, only note something that changes something else, repeats something else, clashes with something else, or seems particularly specific. This way, you’re not just decorating your pages; you’re trying to narrow your focus down to a few patterns in the passage that might affect its tone, its characterization, its structure, or its point of view.
Read the passage once without marking anything at all. Then, read it through a second time and begin by circling any words or images that seem to repeat. Repetition is one way that separate details may begin to relate to each other, and so it can help explain how they work together. “Doors are locked, curtains are closed, arms are folded across the chest,” none of those details is the same as the others, but together, they might form an image of withdrawal or self-protection. Write a short annotation next to your circling, and describe what’s repeated, but don’t jump to conclusions: say something like “repeated sense of closing up,” rather than saying “doors represent loneliness.”
Then look for anything that changes in a particular place in the passage, such as when description gives way to judgment, dialogue becomes brief, a poem’s meter or pace changes, or a relaxed scene suddenly adopts a harsher vocabulary. At the point of change, draw a short line and make a note in plain language: “Tone becomes more defensive,” “Sentences grow short,” “The speaker shifts from memory to immediacy,” etc. The point here is not to decide why the passage does what it does, but to describe what the passage actually does.
Pay particular attention to details that contrast with each other, since writers will often draw together opposing details in order to highlight the tension. The setting may be comfortably warm, but there might be an uneasy conversation going on in the room. A character may seem polite in dialogue, but his actions could betray a grating tone. The narrator might describe one character down to the last stitch on her sleeve and another in only the vaguest outline. Link the contrasting details to each other with a line or with the same symbol in the margin. Then, in the notes you make along with the line or the symbol, consider what tension the contrast is creating. Does the contrast draw your attention to a subtext? Does the contrast make the narrator seem unreliable? Does the contrast complicate what might appear to be a fairly straightforward mood?
Unusual details can be helpful, too, but don’t automatically mark every particular noun or verb or color you run across. If the writer singles out one detail as special—by drawing repeated attention to it, by describing it in an especially specific way, by using it as a turning point in the passage’s structure, or by tying it to a character’s choices—it’s one you might pay special attention to. The word “clock” mentioned in passing once to establish a certain time could be important, but then again, it could just be incidental. A “clock” mentioned multiple times in passing as a distraction from several conversations, and then again a clock’s chimes as a character decides how to proceed, could be more than incidental. It could belong to a larger pattern of delayed time, of pressure, of limited time. Context matters.
When you’ve finished marking your passage, then, you should pick just one of the patterns you’ve found to follow more closely. In a few sentences, you’ll want to begin with an observation rather than an interpretive claim: “The narrator repeatedly presents ordinary noises in potentially threatening language.” Add in a quotation from your chosen section, and explain why one or two of the words are significant. Only after that, you can move on to your larger observation, which might talk about fear, or anxiety, or unreliable narration. Before you finish, though, consider: how did the pattern you marked help you explain how this passage works? How did your other markings help you just notice things the passage is doing?