Close reading is the practice of building a literary interpretation directly from a text's own specific words, sentence structure, imagery and word choice, examined carefully and in detail, rather than from a general impression of the work or from an idea brought in from outside the text itself. Textual evidence is the discipline that accompanies it: the requirement that every interpretive claim a reader makes about a text be traceable back to a specific, quotable passage that actually supports it, not simply asserted as a plausible-sounding general reading.
An interpretation without textual evidence is a claim, not yet an argument
Saying a character seems lonely is an impression; pointing to the character's specific repeated use of passive, distancing language when describing other people, or a specific recurring image of closed doors and empty rooms, and showing how that specific textual detail supports the loneliness reading, is an argument. Close reading treats that difference as genuinely important: a literary interpretation only becomes a defensible critical argument once it's anchored to specific evidence drawn from the actual text, rather than resting on a reader's general sense of what a work seems to be about.
This evidentiary discipline is what lets different interpretations actually be evaluated against each other
Because close reading requires interpretations to be grounded in specific, checkable textual evidence, two readers who reach different conclusions about the same passage can actually compare their reasoning against the same shared text, rather than simply asserting incompatible impressions with no common ground for evaluation. This is exactly what allows literary criticism to function as a genuine field of argument and evidence rather than pure, unaccountable subjective opinion: a close reading can be examined, checked against the actual words on the page, and either supported or challenged by other readers working from that same shared textual evidence.
What we're still unsure about
That grounding literary interpretation in specific textual evidence produces more defensible, checkable critical arguments than unanchored general impressions is well established, foundational practice across literary criticism. What's more genuinely a matter of ongoing critical debate is exactly how much weight a text's own words should carry relative to outside context, an author's biography, historical circumstance, a reader's own social position, in building a genuinely persuasive interpretation, since different critical schools deliberately draw on close reading to differing degrees, and critics continue to actively disagree about how self-sufficient a purely close, text-internal reading can really be.
This sits inside Close Reading & Textual Evidence, one of seven topics in Literary Analysis, one of five domains in Literature, one of seventeen subjects the app can quiz you on.