Analyzing Critical Lens Quotes

 Today in class we discussed the importance of analyzing the critical lens quote as the first step to writing an excellent "Critical Lens" essay.  On Friday I asked everyone to write a critical lens essay for me to use as a diagnostic (a preliminary test to ascertain the student's familiarity with this style of essay).  While grading them I noticed that some students struggled with their interpretation of the quote, which is a crucial step in the writing process. Analyzing quotes is beneficial to everyone, and so today we took it step-by-step and worked our way through the quote from Friday, and began practice on a few new ones.  Here's a link to today's handout. Download Critical Lens Quote analysis An excerpt appears below.

 

ANALYZING CRITICAL LENS QUOTES

When you write a “critical lens” essay the first thing you have to do is analyze the critical lens quote.  This is the most important part of your essay-writing process because if you don’t understand the quote and have a few ideas about how you can apply it to the books you’ve read, then you won’t know what to write about.

So, how do you analyze a quote?  Here are a few things to try:

1.   Circle the most important words/phrases and think about all of their possible meanings.

2.   Rewrite the quote and put it in your own words.

3.   Make a list of books you’ve read that relate to your quote.

4.   Make a more detailed list of particular scenes/characters from the books that relate to your quote.