The Deepening Lens

You have spent the past few weeks thinking about your primary essay, and now the time has come for you to
write an essay of your own—one in which you borrow an idea from your primary essay and deepen your reader’s
understanding of that idea by considering it against two compelling secondary texts (a second essay, one piece of
“experiential” text). Remember: you’re not aiming to summarize your primary essay here—that is, to tell your
reader what she would understand if she read the essay herself—but, rather, you’re attempting to show your
reader some aspect of the primary text’s idea—an implication, or an application, or an amplification—that only
you have seen, because only you have thought about the essay in this specific, idiosyncratic way. In other words,
you are showing the reader the essay’s idea as your mind understands it.
Think of all the authority and expertise you’ve acquired reading, thinking and writing about, and re-reading, rethinking and re-writing about your chosen essay (not to mention your lens and experiential texts!). Now, you get
to present both the most vexing and illuminating of your discoveries for a reader who is smart and capable, but
who is completely unfamiliar with the evidence and thinking you are going to represent, organize, and complicate
on the page.
Your essay should deepen, extend, transform, explicate, amplify, and illuminate the idea that you have discovered
within your primary essay. You can—and should!—be yourself in this essay and show how your mind works, but
do remember that the subject matter here, the object of observation, is not you—it’s the primary text’s idea. What
question do you have about your primary text? What does your secondary text reveal to you about your primary
text’s idea that might help you answer that question? What does your experiential evidence reveal about the
primary text’s idea? What does the experiential evidence reveal about the secondary text? What tensions have you
identified among these texts? What does it look like to articulate those tensions on the page?
5 pages, double-spaced, not including your work cited page
Remember, ALL essays for this course must:
*explore and develop an idea through coherent, interesting arguments
*have a thoughtful beginning, middle and end
*be grammatically correct (don’t just count on spell check! Use style books, dictionaries, and Purdue OWL!)
*have a tone appropriate (and consistent) for an intended general audience (UNFAMILIAR READER!)
*properly integrate and incorporate evidence
*be specific and clear
*have discernible internal logic
*evidence that progressively complicates the idea
*have a proper work cited page and citations within the paragraphs themselves as per MLA standards
The Deepening Lens essay must:
*represent and appreciating the complexity of your primary text
*articulate clear, interesting ideas you’ve identified from your texts
*offer a deepened sense of that initial idea (a “new” idea) that emerges at the end of the essay and is presented to
the reader with logic and consideration of what’s been explored in previous pages
*make productive and interesting use of your secondary lens text (it should not simply confirm the primary text,
but rather complicate, challenge, elucidate, illuminate, amplify, etc.)
*incorporate some manner of experiential evidence, whether it be relevant personal narrative scene work, a
consideration of another piece of art or text, or some problem-introducing context that shows the reader the
relevancy of your ideas to our world today (an analogy, a metaphor, social or scientific phenomena)
*be interesting, with vivid, detailed evocative representations of texts (written and otherwise)
*make substantive use of and incorporate textual evidence (avoid only paraphrasing or summarizing)