Lens Essay

1. Lens Essay Reading a film through a lens 2. Writing a summary of the lens concept/idea

2. 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.

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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.

6. 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)