Reviewing Music

The Basics

Your goal in this assignment is to review a cultural product of your choosing with a focus on music. I want you to decide on the audience you plan to reach with this review and use that audience to determine for yourself elements that are typically decided for you by a professor, like:

• Length: How long can you keep your audience’s attention? How much time does your cultural product deserve? You decide. 
• Citations: If you quote or paraphrase from the thing you are reviewing, will you offer an in-text citation? Will that be helpful to your reader or distracting? If you include one, what citation style will you use?
• Tone: Will you be formal and offer balanced commentary or snarky with a visceral attack? Will you acknowledge that others will or have responded differently or not?
• Extras: Images? Video? Audio? If you think your review needs something like this, I encourage you to incorporate it. 

I will, of course, offer guidance every step of the way. My suggestion is to pick your cultural product, pick your audience, and then just start writing. 

Required: Audience and Revision Notes

This assignment urges you to make decisions about who you will write your review for (audience) and how you will get and process feedback to best reach that audience (revision). I want to offer guidance as you do this, which means I need you to share details on the decisions you made while drafting and revising. Here’s what you need to do:

• At the end of the document containing your rough draft, make sure to include a “Note on Audience,” describing who you are trying to reach and the decisions you made to reach that audience while drafting.
• At the end of the document containing your final draft, make sure to include a revised “Note on Audience” (your choices can certainly change from rough draft to final draft).
• Please also include a “Note on Revision” just below the “Note on Audience” on your final draft, explaining how you sought feedback on your review and the decisions you made after getting that feedback.

These “notes on audience” will be further revised to introduce reviews published on our course website. I will describe how this will work in class.

If you find it useful, here’s an example note on audience from Holden’s technology review:

Note on Audience: I chose to add a short description of what a tube amp is and the difference between solid-state and tube amps. Although my audience is intermediate or possibly beginner guitarists who probably already know the difference, adding this section could be helpful if someone else came across this review who was perhaps shopping for someone else and doesn’t know much about amps at all. I know if I were someone looking for a specific amp, scrolling through reviews trying to find something useful, the one with a video would be the first one I’d click. As a musician, I’d at least want to hear what the product I’m about to buy sounds like if I couldn’t test the product out myself. I added the video into my review because I think that is a really beneficial addition to a review for any music equipment, and any musician would appreciate that. I also chose not to go into too much detail about the specific controls and what each of them do because again, my target audience is intermediate guitarists, or maybe a beginner, someone looking for their first amp, but someone who still knows the basics. I think if I had gone into detail about each control and what it does, that might turn some people off to the review and they’d find another one that is more suited for them or more interesting to them.

Extra Credit

If you volunteer to have your draft workshopped in class, you get an extra half-letter grade bump. Please e-mail me if you would like to do this (I might miss your request if you mention it in the chat during class or in annotations on this prompt). We will likely only be able to workshop one rough draft per class period.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a cultural product? 

This is a huge umbrella term we will use this semester to describe the many things produced by cultures. Films, paintings, tv shows, and songs are some of the most obvious choices, but there are many other things that we can think of as cultural products: games (from card games like Uno to professional leagues like the NFL), institutions (like the Army or your local Board of Education), and takeout food (I can imagine excellent reviews of takeout during quarantine).

How do I review with a focus on performance?

All of the cultural products mentioned above and many more include the features we will be exploring this semester (technology, text, performance, music, and visual art). Music is everywhere, and I encourage you to look for it in the cultural products you regularly engage with. What sounds fill the public spaces you tentatively enter during this pandemic? Muzak in the grocery store? Jazz in outdoor dining spaces? What music is playing during the climactic moments in your favorite show? Who produced that music and what impact does it have on the overall impact of the show? If you have been able to attend a musical performance live, a review could focus on the set list, but you can also review an album or even a newly released single. You can also review a cultural product that is not recorded music, but incorporates it in some way (a television show, a film, a basketball game, a video game, etc..

You might want to continue reviewing a genre or area of culture that you chose for the first three reviews or you might want to change directions completely.

What is a Review?

It might seem a little surprising to see this as a new section in our fourth review, but I think we are ready now to address the goals of review writing more explicitly. We will work together over the next two weeks to define what a review is and what it is not. I have many opinions about this, and am eager to make decisions about it as a class.

Do I know enough to review something?

Research is emerging as an important element in successful reviews, so we will be focusing on it more explicitly with this and future reviews. If you know you want to discuss a cultural product but have never read a review of it, I encourage you to get your observations and impressions down first and then start reading what others have to say about it. I want to help you all learn to find a balance between wielding your own expertise and situating your perspective within larger conversations. By the time you have finished your review, you should have done enough reading to project authority to the audience you are trying to reach (different audiences expect different things!). Your review should communicate what you have learned with citations that help your reader (and give proper credit to those whose work you have drawn from). The format of those citations is still open, and we will discuss options.

When is this paper due?

Rough draft and final draft deadlines are in Canvas.

How can I get feedback on my work?

You can get feedback on your work at any stage in the process in a variety of ways:

• In class: My absolute favorite way to provide feedback on drafts is by discussing a student’s draft together as a class. To do this, make sure you have the most up-to-date draft in your word online document or in Kaizena so I can pull it up easily from my computer during class.
• Revision Workshops: I will form 5 revision groups (3-4 students each) that we will use frequently during the semester. I hope that these group will provide a space to discuss work in progress and get feedback on your ideas and drafts.
• One-on-one: Drop by my office hours (in the syllabus; always reserved for students), make an appointment using my online scheduler (calendly.com/maryisbell), or talk to me before or after class.
• Online: Join our course group at Kaizena and share your document (or just post a message about your ideas) in a conversation with me or the whole class. I’ll demonstrate how Kaizena works in class.
• At the Writing Center: Tutors at the writing center will encourage you to talk through your ideas and read whatever you’ve got written aloud. These 45-minute appointments are a fantastic way to improve your work. You can sign up for an appointment using the online schedule.

How do you grade?

I will read your review and determine a grade based on how successfully it accomplishes the work of the assignment. I will also give you a spreadsheet that I call the “framework for feedback,” which will help you see where you should focus your attention on future assignments. This framework breaks the work of an assignment down into seven sections and then indicates how successful you’ve been in each section. 

Claim

Basic	Beginning	Developing	Competent	Mature
Writer has not developed a claim that responds to the assignment. The project is a series of observations or attempts at ideas.	Writer has struggled to develop a claim that responds to the assignment. One or more ideas could become the primary claim of the project, but the entire project does not work to support this point	Writer has developed a claim and introduced it to the reader somewhere in project, but that claim is significantly lacking in complexity and originality.	Writer has developed an original claim, but has not accounted for counterclaims as he/she revises the project. The claim could be more complex by addressing counterclaims.	Claim exhibits complexity and nuance through the writer’s consideration of counterclaims.

Process

Basic	Beginning	Developing	Competent	Mature
The writer has turned in a final project, but has not participated in the drafting and revision process	The writer has composed a draft and made surface changes before handing in the final draft. The writer has not participated fully in the drafting and revision process.	The writer has participated in the revision process in a superficial way. The writer has not used the revision process to full advantage	The writer has participated actively in the process and made substantial revisions from rough to final draft, taking full advantage of feedback from instructor and peers.	The writer has participated actively in the process and made substantial revisions from rough to final draft, taking full advantage of feedback from instructor and peers. Furthermore, the writer has continued with this process of revision until the final product is as strong as possible.

Analysis

Basic	Beginning	Developing	Competent	Mature
The project does not engage the cultural product in any meaningful way	The project references one or more features of the cultural product as appropriate for the assignment, but introduces sections of the cultural product that are irrelevant to the goals of the project	The writer draws on sections of the text that are implicitly relevant to the project, but does not offer explicit analysis in individual paragraphs to make the relevance clear to the reader. There is a logic to the ideas introduced, but the reader has to guess why they have been chosen.	The writer has demonstrated that he/she can offer analysis of one section of the cultural product to support his/her claim, but has not done this consistently in the project	The writer has offered thoughtful analysis of the cultural product reviewed.

Organization

Basic	Beginning	Developing	Competent	Mature
The project reads like a list of unrelated ideas. The writer would benefit from more careful attention to logical arrangement of well-structured paragraphs with transition sentences	The project reads like a list of unrelated ideas. One of the ideas might have the potential to become a primary claim, but it is not presented as such, and the other unrelated ideas do not support that claim.	Ideas are introduced in a logical order, but the writer has not taken advantage of paragraphs with clear topic sentences and transitions between ideas	The writer has demonstrated that he/she can construct a persuasive paragraph with a clear topic sentence and careful analysis related to one distinct point, but has not done this throughout the project.	The writer has organized his/her project thoughtfully, offering carefully ordered paragraphs that contain clear topic sentences. Transitions between these paragraphs are logical and the reader is able to understand the purpose of all components of the project.

Citation 

Basic	Beginning	Developing	Competent	Mature
It is difficult to tell if the ideas in the project are the ideas of the writer or something the writer has read. This is the grade given when the instructor believes the errors in citation are not deliberate cheating but a misuse of sources	Writer references the work of other writers and indicates in some way that those ideas are not the writer’s own ideas, but the writer does not include in-text citations.	Writer struggles to indicate through sentences that the ideas of others are not his/her own.	The writer has demonstrated that he/she can introduce the ideas of others clearly, but has not done this with every text referenced in the project.	The writer has introduced all ideas from other writers and has even made it clear how his/her ideas forward or counter those ideas to say something new

Clarity

Basic	Beginning	Developing	Competent	Mature
The project is impossible to understand because of sentence-level issues	The project is difficult to understand because of sentence-level issues	Multiple sentence-level errors make the project confusing in places	Occasional sentence-level issues interrupt an otherwise easy-to-understand project	The writer has expressed his/her ideas clearly

Audience

Basic	Beginning	Developing	Competent	Mature
The project exhibits no attention to an audience for the writer’s work.	The project makes occasional moves that might be effective with a particular audience (or perhaps moves that would be effective with different audiences), but this does not seem to have been done deliberately.	The writer makes a sustained effort to appeal to a particular audience, but makes poor decisions that would likely prove ineffective or counterproductive. The project would be stronger if the writer considered the values and expectations of his/her audience	The writer has demonstrated that he/she can appeal effectively to a particular audience, but hasn’t used this sense of audience to full advantage	The writer has appealed consistently to a specific audience, anticipating potential counterarguments and demonstrating the relevance of the project to the values/concerns of the audience.