Mentor Text: Every Song on ‘The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill’ Ranked by Veracia Ankrah
Techniques:
- Review
Background –
I have a couple of pursuits that I feel like I’m constantly developing, filing texts for future use, and stockpiling ideas.
The music writing pursuit is one nearest and dearest to my heart. It’s pretty rare that students don’t have opinions and feelings about music, so this pursuit often allows us to explore expression with a level of diversity that engages them.
And it makes it okay to listen to music while we’re working.
Exclaim! is one of my favorite Canadian music news outlets, and I still get the print edition, which is nice. They’ve got a wonderful staff of writers, covering diverse genres. As I’m writing this, I realize that they’ve done a number of ranking pieces lately. I really like the focus of this one.
How we might use this text:
Review – First off, I really love the structure of this piece. There’s a nice intro that lays out facts, which is a nice way to get students doing some research, and presenting that. I love encouraging students to build context in their introductions, and perhaps frontloading the facts before they get into the opinion part.
Then, as I said above, I love the focus of this one. Instead of focusing on an artist’s catalogue, this focuses on a single album. (I mean, Hill’s discography is limited to this album, so there’s that.) As I’ve been listening to Scott Aukerman and Adam Scott’s deep dive podcast into Springsteen’s work, I’ve been thinking that there are wild swings on an album, but often more so in a discography. I feel like any tool we can use to focus our writers is one we should employ. (Not to mention the fact that an album can be listened to in a much shorter period of time than a discography. Or, considering the two artists I’ve mentioned here, the imbalance in the task of ranking Lauryn Hill’s single album over the endeavour of ranking Springsteen’s output.)
Ankrah sets out criteria for her judgements, which is a good model for our writers that might need that guidance. Then, she shares her justification for her choices. I like that the length of these varies, so that our writers can see that though the format of the task might encourage it, and there are spots where her feelings come through, highlighting that this is, at heart, a subjective task.
There is no shortage of mentor texts for reviews, and no shortage of mentor texts for writing about music. That being said, I’m always overjoyed to find one I love, or one that does things a little bit differently. As soon as I saw this one, I knew I wanted students to play with ranking an album like this.
Do you have any favorite review mentor texts? How about mentor texts for music writing? And which artist have you done this kind of ranking for already?
Leave a comment below or find me on Twitter @doodlinmunkyboy!
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