Lens Essay
1. Reading a film through a lens
2. Writing a summary of the lens
concept/idea
What am I supposed to do?
• The first step in writing the lens essay is summarizing the concept or idea
that you are using as your ‘lens’
• When working from a critical or theoretical piece to find the lens, you need
only pull one idea from it to think about in your analysis of the film.
• Draw DETAILS/SPECIFICS from the film to explain how the film works
through OR AGAINST the idea you are using as the lens.
• Though your essay should include a summary of the lens idea/concept at
the beginning, be sure to discuss the details and the lens idea throughout
the essay to make your case about the film.
Concepts from the reading
• How motion works in film/James Whale
(1931) film version of Frankenstein
• The idea that terror in the novel drawn from
feminine experience of birth gone wrong
(Moers)/Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
Writing Summaries
• Writing strong summaries will always serve you well, in
college and beyond. You might think of the summary as
the foundation for all other kinds of complex writing
because the higher the quality of a piece of writing, the
more it takes into account what other people have
written on the same subject. Being able to summarize
another person’s arguments is a first step in generating
your own arguments about a topic.
• Paraphrase: a restatement of a text or passage in other
words, often to clarify meaning
• Summary: a presentation of the substance of a body of
material in a condensed form or by reducing it to its main
points; an abstract
Writing Summaries (2)
When writing a summary, you are condensing a large body of material into a
condensed form. That means you should try to avoid overly detailed
descriptions of what a person writes about. A summary should be short
and concise, but not overly general or vague. Needless to say, this is
difficult to do. Here are a few tips to help you write solid summaries
•
Read through a text fully, making some marginal notes, before starting
to figure out the main argument or the portion of the argument that
you think is most important
•
After you understand the concept on which you choose to focus, write
it in your own words
•
In addition to the larger argument the author makes, try to give a
sense of the central points, or claims, the author uses to form the
argument. This is the difficult part, and it requires great discernment.
You want to be specific enough to avoid making vague statements, but
you also don’t want to describe each detail of the argument.
Writing Summaries (3)
•
Be sure to use tags when summarizing someone’s argument:
X argues that… She also claims that… Despite her
suggestion that, she later shows… At one point, she even
insists that… Overall, X avers that… In the final portion of her
argument, X implies that… by stating… She also notes that…
The most consistent mistake I see in student papers is the
absence of the tags that let the reader know that we are still
in the land of someone else’s argument. Using these will
make it crystal clear to your reader which portions of a
paragraph are your OWN ideas, and which are the
summarized ideas of others.
•
Avoid OVER-QUOTATION (we will discuss the use of
quotation further in class)