Writer to Writer

Guiding Principle: it doesn't matter if you find the 'guiding principle" first, or have your song. Either way, you need a guiding principle to help you express your own thoughts about the relevance of the text you are writing on.

The 'guiding principle' is a global theory/concept/idea from a professional authority that you use to focus your own audience on how to look at your local subject.

The 'guiding principle' is the match that lights your candle. The 'guiding principle' allows you to see your subject out of the shadows. The 'guiding principle' allows you to give form to your own ideas.

For example, pretend that famous lit critic Harold Bloom said that most literature of the 1950s was anti-feminst and showed that Americans valued women only as homemakers. I could apply his idea to reading a novel from that time period. I could write an essay analyzing whether it proved or disproved Harold Bloom's theory. Bloom's theory guides me to discuss the novel in terms of its feminist or anti-feminist themes!

Find A Guiding Principle

For your own essays (and whenever you are asked to analyze a subject), you will want to find a guiding principle that helps you express larger ideas about the text.

In regards to Response 3, you will want to use a "guiding principle" that relates to the subject of the song, and perhaps one that theorizes on music itself.

To find:

1) Where to look? Search for articles on your local/ library database.

2) What to look for? Look for texts that do exactly what you are supposed to do in your own assignments. In our case, you are analyzing music for social relevance. So, look for an article/text that is analyzes music and society.

• search "music" and "society" and different forms of this word. I searched for "music theory" and "culture" on Columbia C's library on-line catalog.

• You might also enter in search terms that deal more directly with your song's subject (love, teenagers, abuse, infidelity (cheating), ethnicity (Mexican, Latin, African, European, Caucasian), type of music (hip hop, pop, disco, techno, rock, etc.).

• When you attempt to find an article that will help inspire your own writing, you want to give yourself as many search terms as you can. You never know what kind of cool texts are out there, written by professionals in the academic disciplines -- like you, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists and even chemists love music, and often someone in their field has written an article on music and its relation within their field.

Writing Activity: Questions & Considerations To Answer In Your Analysis

You are going to spend time, in silence, writing out answers to the questions provided on the guidelines handout for Response 3. Only, I want you to consider two more things as you are writing out your answers:

1) Point of view / tone the singer takes --> good writing takes into account and incorporates not only what is being said, but HOW what is being said is to be taken. Work on adding this into your analysis. (There is a difference between "I", "we" and "they." What are the implications of the point of view taken? Is the writer including her/himself, or are they speaking out against someone?)

2) Pay attention to your own verbs and modifiers! Work on being creative with your verbs by experimenting with tonally-appropriate verbs in your discussion of the songs.

• Instead of using bland verbs like "sings" and "raps" try to use verbs with emotional/intellectual layers --> "mourns," "meditates," "screams," "exults," "rattles," etc. Nail down your analysis by nailing down the tone with the use of verbs that emphasize the way a song is sung!

• The same goes for using adjectives and adverbs in discussing lyrics. Are notes stretched out or sped up. Reflect upon how a line is sung and how that adds to the meaning of the lyrics!