Since few, if any, of you have ever written a paper about a concert of live music, it is critical that you carefully review the guidelines for this assignment before you attend your concert and again as you work on the paper. Be sure to contact your teacher if you still have questions after you have reviewed the material listed here.
About the Concert Report
In order to successfully complete this assignment you must familiarize yourself with all of the following material before you attend your concert, and you will want to review at least parts of it while you work on the report and again before submitting the assignment.
- Assignment Deadlines – Consult the course calendar for concert report due dates.
- Report Format – An outline of the format you must follow for this assignment.
- Sample Report – An example of a completed concert report, with commentary.
- Report Checklist – A list you can use while working on the report and before handing it in to make sure your didn’t miss anything.
- Report FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions concerning the concert report assignment; contains very important information about the assignment format, expectations, and so on.
- All About Concerts – Important information about attending concerts for this assignment.
- Concert List – The list of concerts that qualify for this assignment. You may attend only the concerts on this list.
The submission deadline is listed in the course calendar, and is generally in week 6 – but check the calendar since this is subject to change.
You are required to complete one concert report with a non-failing grade if you want to pass the class — so not doing a concert report is not an option. The following section describes an important option if you do not earn a grade higher than F on the first report.
Optional Second Concert Report
You may optionally do a second concert report if you are unsatisfied with the grade you earn on the first report. You will earn a weighted average of your two concert report grades. The weighted average favors the optional second report — currently the optional second report gets twice the weight of the original report, rewarding you for better work on the optional second report. (If the optional second report grade is lower than the first concert report grade you will retain the grade from the first report.)
If you choose to do the optional second report you should take steps to ensure that your grade can be higher than it was on the first report. Some of the following are likely to help.
- Go to your concert as early as possible. Waiting until the last minute to pick an event is a common cause of lower report grades. Go at least two weeks before the report is due.
- Write a rough draft immediately after the concert. Putting your notes away after the concert and not coming back to them until just before the paper is due often leads to problems. I recommend that you very quickly convert your concert notes into rough text immediately after the concert. Do not wait!
- Bring an early draft of your paper to an office hour for review. Do this a minimum of a week before the paper is due. If you aren’t finished yet, it is fine to bring a very rough draft or even just part of the paper. This will let us work together to find and fix problems before you turn your work in for a grade. (It may not be possible to preview your paper if you wait until right before it is due.)
- Pick a concert that will work well for you. Avoid a concert that is late at night on a day when you will be very tired. Try to pick something that looks a bit more interesting to you. Make sure you can arrive at the event well before it starts, even if traffic or other factors cause an unanticipated delay.
- Your event must occur after the deadline for the first report unless you make other arrangements with the teacher well before the due date for the second report.
You must attend different concerts for the first and second reports. This optional assignment requires that you attend and report on a different concert than the event you used for your first report. Unless you get advance approval from the teacher you may NOT submit a rewritten version of your first report for your optional second report.
Dan Mitchell 