For this assignment, students step into the role of “cultural critic.” The tone of blog posts is professional but entertaining. Students should write for a diverse audience who may not be familiar with the text or texts discussed, the genre the text is part of, or the concepts learned in class and applied when analyzing the text (or texts).

Blog Post One: Music

Students will choose a song or album and create a 500 – 750-word post describing, analyzing, and evaluating the song or album. Songs or albums discussed cannot be part of assigned cultural content.

To achieve core area objectives, students will be asked to pay special attention to the following questions:

• How does what you have learned from class apply to the cultural object? (Critical Thinking)
• In what way does the production of the cultural object affect the final product? (Critical Thinking)
• How is the artist/author/musician/actor/director/etc. (artist for short) positioned in society (race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, disability)? (Social Responsibility)
• How does the artist’s position in society affect the production, consumption, interpretation and reception of the object? (Social Responsibility)
• How does the object represent an ethical position? If an ethical position appears to be missing, what could be the reasons that it is missing? (Personal Responsibility)

GUIDELINES

After you take notes on the topic of your blog, think about your paper. Writing is a process, and should not simply answer the above questions. This is where critical thinking and communication are important.

Generate a thesis (a claim you will make and support throughout your blog post). Your thesis should be related to ideas from the course (think about representation, social construction, power, discourse, etc.).

After you have a solid claim, identify reasons you have for making your argument and evidence that supports it.

Your blog post should be well structured. Each paragraph should be coherent and cohesive. They should contain reasons and evidence that clearly support your claim (thesis). The reasons and evidence explored in the paragraph should be communicated in a topic sentence.

Always proofread before handing in the final draft. Blogs are dynamic and multimedia. Be sure to include pictures and hyperlinks to videos about the topics that you discuss. Also make sure to link to relevant material.

Write each blog post in a word processor before transferring it to the discussion board. Each post should be 250 – 750 words, standard 12-point font (i.e. Times New Roman, Courier, Cambria), double spaced, one-inch margins.