From Brandeis.edu Guidelines: The Lens Essay The lens essay uses one text to shed light on another in order to show readers something they would not have been able to see if they had examined the texts in isolation. In most assignments, the lens essay challenges students by requiring them to analyze texts on a theoretical level in addition to the thematic level that was emphasized in the close reading essay. Because it requires the use of two sources, the lens essay assignment sequence is typically taught after the close reading essay. The typical length of a lens essay assignment is between seven and nine pages. Goals: The primary goal of the lens essay is for students to be able to achieve a baseline reading of some piece of culture using a lens text. In other words, students should be able to defend some central claim about the text they are examining by linking moments in that text to categories or ideas in the lens text. Students should continue to use and improve the close reading skills they employed in the first essay. For more advanced students who are able to produce a compelling baseline lens reading of a text, the ideal of the lens essay would be for those students to complicate their baseline reading using some counterevidence from the text and then to use that complicating evidence to reflect critically back on the lens text itself. Guidelines, Type of texts: The lens essay typically employs a theoretical text as the lens and uses it to examine a piece of art or culture. Using Alone Together (book: anything from intro- chapter 3). as a LENS to write about the future with an aspect of technology: The future of relationships, the future of education, the future of medicine, the future of sports, the future of families etc. You will need to refer to Turkle throughout.
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