Sources Photographs and readings for this essay can be found on the CourseDocs section of the website, linked above. Note that this essay is a closed system: you are not allowed to use any source other than those directly linked from the CourseDocs site. In choosing articles and in supplying some links, I’ve tried to anticipate your needs; if you find you need something more, see me in office hours. Note also: the picture at right will be discussed extensively in class, and so is not a viable as the main focus of your essay—though you may reference it in an essay on another photograph.

Essay Assignment

Write a five-page (1300-1600 word) analysis of one of the photographs on the front page of the CourseDocs site. Your essay should deepen the reader’s understanding of what makes this photograph so rhetorically powerful—or, alternatively, should use the photo as an opportunity to challenge the reader’s preconceptions, for example as to why photographs matter or what makes them eloquent. Your essay can draw on a second photo for purposes of comparison, and should make reference to at least one of the secondary sources we read during the course of this unit, as well as information directly linked from the CourseDocs site.

A successful essay will persuade: one of the greatest challenges in writing is to offer a telling argument to audiences that see the world differently from you. Persuading such readers means showing them the world as you see it, not simply presenting evidence but forcing readers to look at your examples and reconsider their preconceptions. After all, the Latin roots of “evidence” mean literally “as a result of seeing.”

A successful essay will grapple with all the details, not just those that neatly fit your argument: academic writing isn’t a legal brief shouldn’t be just a means to an end, so that readers wind up exchanging one set of preconceptions (theirs) for another (yours). If you’re going to ask readers to look deeply at your evidence and see the world a new way, the least you can do is take the trouble to do that first yourself.

Hence the “Close Reading” essay, a staple of writing classes in high school as well as college. You’ve probably been asked, at some point in your career as a student, to write an essay that looks closely at a poem or short story. This assignment is like that, but we’re going to focus on a set of challenges that I think you will find new and interesting:

• vivid description — conveying to your reader the experience of looking at a photograph first-hand
• strand analysis — explaining, by reference to set of related details, how an image or text evokes a particular response from viewers
• binary analysis — tracing distinctions that shape the way we think
• comparative analysis — using contrast and similarity to sharpen understanding
• reformulating — moves to deepen understanding
• drawing on the ideas of others for inspiration and insight.