When you are writing an essay or a review or a dissertation or even just commenting a text, there are several levels of analysis that you need to apply before you are actually able to interpret and critique such text. Here, the visual metaphors of “zooming in and out of a map” mean the following:
The map is actually the logical and conceptual outline of your essay. Specifically, you have several notions, concepts or ideas in your head but they are all jumbled and disorganized, you need to create a proper organization, including the main idea or ideas, then the sub-ideas that are associated to the main ideas and organize them into an introduction, the body of your essay with each of its main ideas and sub-ideas and then the conclusion. If you continue to use a visual metaphor, imagine that the ideas in your brain are like a map of a newly discovered land. You know that here are mountains, villages, rivers, and even cities. Let’s say that the cities are your main ideas, the sub-ideas are like the small towns, the rivers are the transitions from one idea to the other and the mountains are the conclusions.
Of course, like when you use Google Earth you zoom out when you want to visualize states or countries and you zoom in when you want to visualize, cities, towns and then even streets and finally houses. When you analyze a text it is the same, you zoom out and you see the whole text (country) or the paragraphs (states) and then you zoom in and you see the cities (main ideas), then the small towns (sub-ideas) then the sentences (streets) and finally the houses (words).
It may seem incredible to you but the choice of words in a text or in verbal speech conveys meaning. It isn’t the same to say “the government might help you” implying that it might not, it is just a possibility), than to say “the government will help you” (which conveys actual volition and/or certainty from the government to actually help you). As you zoom out you notice that also the sentences help convey meaning and then the paragraphs and so forth.
