Paper #1 Writ 1301

The speaker talks about their experience in a writing intensive class where they explored the connection between music and culture. They discuss their struggles with time management and procrastination, but eventually learn to navigate the writing process. They highlight the challenges of describing music and the subjective nature of musical preferences. They also mention their research paper comparing the teaching methods of the cello and the sarangi. Through this class, they learn to improve their time management and develop a better appreciation for the writing process. Navigating the writing process through music, analysis, and research. Last semester I took a writing intensive class called Music and Signing Cultures, which was a requirement for my major. I never thought of myself as a strong writer at all, getting mostly B's or C's in my papers, though I was procrastinating until the night before the exam was due to actually write my paper. Now that I'm in college, I definitely need to work on some of my weaknesses such as time management throughout the writing process. The class had three papers that we wrote which were, I believe, 1,000, 1,500, and 2,500 words. By this time, the last paper I wrote was a three-page research paper on chemical engineering. The first paper was about comparing two different music performances that we saw at the Cedar Arts Festival. The third paper was a research paper that had to relate to some of the articles we read in class. For me, I chose to research the differences of the pedagogies, teachings of the sarangi, Indian instrument, and the cello. In my first paper about comparing the performances of two different musical cultures, I first did field research on the two performances, which for me entitled writing some notes on my phone on the different instruments used, the atmosphere of the room, how much crowd involvement there was, the people that attended the concert, and taking lots of videos of the performances for later. After I took the notes, I procrastinated about writing the paper because I knew it would be really difficult to make notes into a paper, and 1,000 words seemed like a huge paper. So the day before the paper was due, I went to work. I first looked at my crantic notes I made during the performance, which were not very good, but the videos were very helpful in writing about it. I took around 10 videos out of the performances, which was more than I needed. I felt really goofy when I took all the videos because everyone was dancing, not just in the back trying to carefully take a video of what the trumpeters were doing. I decided to structure my paper with a brief introduction to the two bands, a paragraph each for the musical groups where I gave detailed analysis of their performances, and finally a paragraph where I detailed the many differences and similarities between the groups. The most difficult part of writing this paper was taking music and describing it well enough for the reader to understand, because to really understand music, you need to hear it, not read it. Music is also really subjective in how you hear it. Like for me, the second group had a much better groove, and I enjoyed listening to their music much more than the first. The easiest part was thinking of the differences between these two groups. The first one was called La Perla, which was an all-female group from Colombia that used traditional percussion instruments from Latin America while rapping and singing in Spanish. The second group was an artist named Wally that rapped in English and Creole and French. His band had Western instruments such as trumpets, saxophones, guitars, and drums. For my last paper, it was a research paper where we had to choose a topic while still using a source from our textbook. Picking a topic for this paper gave me a lot of anxiety. There were so many things I could do, but I didn't feel like I was passionate enough to write a six-page paper on it. I asked all my friends in the class what their topics would be. Some of them were how early music exposure as a kid affects brain development, even the impact of Billie Eilish in America. My first idea was to study the best teaching methods for instrumentalists, because I plan to teach cello after I graduate, but I wasn't really interested in learning about other instruments. Then my TA suggested that I should focus on comparing the cello and its teaching methods or pedagogies and compare it to the Hindustani instrument called the sarangi and its pedagogies, which would give me lots of sources of drawing from our textbook. It was a brilliant idea, and I thanked her graciously and began the research right away. I scoured the U of M library to find any readings on the sarangi, but only found one good source that talked about the sarangi. I was crestfallen. I wanted to use a big book, so I had lots of information to skim through. For the cello part, I already knew a lot of it, but decided to still borrow cello pedagogy books that I could cite. Overall, I had around eight sources that were cited for the book. Before I started going too deep in my research, I outlined what my body paragraphs would be about. The first and second paragraphs would be giving an overview of these two different instruments, telling the reader the differences and the similarities of them. The last paragraph would inform me of how the teachers of these instruments taught their students. I knew this paper would be impossible to do in one day, and I really wanted to improve my time management, so I set a timer for one hour every day, where I would go through the sources making notes on a Google Doc. After I felt that I had sufficient information for the paragraphs, I would start writing my paragraphs. I soon realized that I had no idea how I would cite my sources in the paragraphs. I spoke with my TA, Maria, afterwards, and she taught me how to use footnotes in Chicago Now, after some editing, I managed to create a paper and not feel completely stressed out the night before it was due. This course taught me a lot about my bad habits to perseverance. A couple of papers later, I learned how to manage my time effectively and actually enjoy the writing process.