Read Like a Professor

What You Will Learn

Reading analytically is among the most transferable skills in academic life — from literary analysis essays to standardized test passages to college seminars. Steven teaches you to read actively, purposefully, and with the kind of attention that turns ordinary reading into genuine understanding.

• Close reading and annotation — How to mark a text for argument, tone, structure, and language
• Author’s purpose and rhetoric — What is this writer trying to do, and how are they doing it?
• Subtext and implication — Reading what is not said as carefully as what is
• Structure and form — How a text is organized and why those choices matter
• Poetry as language — Sound, image, and compression in verse
• Fiction analytically — Character, narrator, and the machinery of narrative
• Nonfiction and argument — Evidence, reasoning, and rhetorical strategy
• Comparing texts — Finding dialogue between sources and ideas
• AP and college exam strategies — Free-response and multiple-choice literary analysis

How Sessions Work

Sessions are built around texts you bring (from class, from the AP curriculum, or chosen together), and Steven coaches you through the reading in real time — not simply telling you what a passage means, but teaching you how to arrive at meaning yourself. Students typically leave with a set of habits and tools they can apply independently to any text.

About Your Instructor

Steven B. Killion holds a PhD in English Language and Literature from UNC-Chapel Hill and taught reading, writing, and humanities at the university level for many years. He has written, assigned, and graded literary analysis at every level — which means he knows what sophisticated reading looks like and how to build it.