This brief, affordable text helps students find the layers of meaning in written, oral, visual, and mediated texts. It focuses on the act and techniques of criticism rather than on schools of thought or grand theories, showing students how to engage inthe act of close reading in ways that work with a variety of critical methods and texts. After an introduction to the general subject of close reading, the book explains the relationships among theory, methods, texts, and techniques of rhetorical criticism. Subsequent chapters describe techniques for discovering form, rhetorical tropes, argument, and ideologies within texts. A concluding chapter offers a single extended reading of a comic strip that appeared shortly before the inauguration of Barack Obama, demonstrating the combined use of the some of the techniques from each chapter. The book is intentionally short so that it can be paired with longer, more theoretically oriented texts, but it can also be used as a stand-alone text if it is supplemented with other material.