Your first major assignment, due in a few weeks, calls for you to write an “expository synthesis,” an authoritative report that brings readers up-to-speed with expert opinion on a topic. Whereas in an essay typically advances the author’s thesis, a report presents an understanding that is not, strictly speaking, the author’s.

That doesn’t mean your synthesis can’t be interesting or original. Look, for example, at the way New Yorker writer John Lanchester introduces “The Case Against Civilization”; while his mission is to provide a run-down of recent scholarship on the Neolithic Revolution, he opens by musing over the question of what technology he would miss most. So consider how you might give a personal “spin” to your synthesis of expert opinion.