Lessons on close reading... from a spider

Today I read an excerpt from Patricia Kain's explanation on how to "close read". Patricia provided, in her writing, a story about an explorer's discovery of a spider. The explorer discovered the spider on its own web and tapped it with his pencil. The web began to react (acting as a puppet of the spider) and provided the explorer with an observation. Now, the reason that Patricia included this story is because she wanted to teach us how to use the steps of close reading, "annotating", "looking for patterns" and "asking questions", steps one, two, and three respectively, to dissect piece of writing in order to significantly improve our understanding. Her definition of close reading is defined in those three steps. Collectively, Kain defines close reading as the ability to dissect, analyze, and come to conclusions about the piece of written text in question. While stumbling around the vast universe that is google, I came about a slightly different interpretation of what close reading is. While reading through the passage on http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/s/a/sam50/closeread.htm, I received a slightly more forward opinion of what close reading is. "Dr. McClennen" (as quoted from the text) defines close reading as simply to interpret what you are reading. Patricia Kain, however, defines close reading as a collaboration of steps, not just one single solitary idea. It is interesting how different people have different ways of explaining this concept.