  The persistently mysterious deviations from unity of the ratio of nuclear
target structure functions to those of deuterium as measured in deep inelastic
scattering (often termed the "EMC Effect") have become the canonical observable
for studies of nuclear medium modifications to free nucleon structure in the
valence regime. The structure function of the free proton is well known from
numerous experiments spanning decades. The free neutron structure function,
however, has remained difficult to access. Recently it has been extracted in a
systematic study of the global data within a parton distribution function
extraction framework and is available from the CTEQ-Jefferson Lab (CJ)
Collaboration. Here, we leverage the latter to introduce a new method to study
the EMC Effect in nuclei by re-examining existing data in light of the the
magnitude of the medium modifications to the free neutron and proton structure
functions independently. From the extraction of the free neutron from world
data, it is possible to examine the nuclear effects in deuterium and their
contribution to our interpretation of the EMC Effect. In this study, we observe
that the ratio of the deuteron to the sum of the free neutron and proton
structure functions has some $x_{B}$ and $Q^{2}$ dependencies that impact the
magnitude of the EMC Effect as typically observed. Specifically, different EMC
slopes are obtained when data from different $x_{B}$ and $Q^{2}$ values are
utilized. While a linear correlation persists between the EMC and short range
correlation effects, the slope is modified when deuteron nuclear effects are
removed.
