OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this project is to demonstrate your ability to evaluate recent scholarly work on some topic in music and to communicate your opinion in a manner appropriate to a professional forum.

Guidelines

• In brief, you are to write a book review of a recent book, doctoral dissertation or major scholarly edition, such as would be published in MLA Notes, Music & Letters, or some other professional journals, according to the following guidelines.
• The item you choose to review must be approved in advance by me. Failure to secure my approval of the item that you review will result in an automatic 25-point deduction from the earned grade. Send the information (author, title, year of publication) to me via email, and wait for my reply.
• In general, the item you choose should be relatively recent (published roughly in the last 5 years or less, with preference to newer items), and it should not have been widely reviewed. I may refuse to allow reviews of items that have too many professional reviews (perhaps more than 2 in easily accessible sources), so check first in RILM, the Music Index , or other resouces.
• The item itself should be at least 100 pages of primarily scholarly or professional text. Longer items that are well illustrated may be allowed, so long as there is sufficient text in them. Similarly, editions of music must contain an equivalent amount of descriptive or analytical text (in addition to the printed music) to merit a review. Items that were written for juveniles, as textbooks, as picture books, or as popular entertainment are not allowed, nor are recordings, DVDs, and similar items.
• Doctoral dissertations over 200 pages (assuming they contain double-spaced text) and completed in the last 5 years may be chosen for review, provided they meet all other criteria listed above. If a dissertation has been revised and published as a book, you should consider that later version for review.
• You are encouraged to choose an item that relates to your bibliography project or to other professional interests.

Writing the Review

• Again, you must secure my permission to review a particular item, so make sure that your choice conforms to the guidelines above. If possible, have at least 2-3 alternate titles in mind.
• It is your responsibility to obtain a copy of the book from any source that you wish to use. You are not required to purchase a book, although you may, if you desire. Instead, you can find items in the UCF Library, other area libraries, or via ILL. Note, however, that you cannot argue for an extension based on problems in obtaining the item.
• The focus of your review should be primarily descriptive and evaluative, and if possible, should place the item into the context of similar publications intended for a professional audience. In addition to describing the item, you should pass judgement on the value of it, including such aspects as the apparent accuracy of the contents, its organization and ease of use, the quality of the object's production, and any obvious errors or problems that you note. You should conclude your review with a comment on the likely users for the item and your opinion of who might need or want to use or purchase this item.
• Although you may want to mention (briefly) similar items for comparison in your review, do not include footnotes to reference such items. Instead give full citations in the body of your review. See recent issues of Notes or other journals for models of how to do that, or ask me for help.
• In general, your review should make effective use of your word-processor's capabilities to ensure that all items of a type, e.g., paragraphs, line-spacing, fonts, etc., are treated consistently. You will be down-graded if your review relies too heavily on hand-formatting, rather than using the program's features, to solve formatting problems. See the instructions for the "major paper" for a more detailed discussion of this matter.

Editing the Document (OPTIONAL)

• As with your program note assignment, you may edit the work of a classmate, and have your own work edited by a classmate. This is NOT a requirement of the assignment.
• To ensure you both have time to edit, your preliminary draft should be ready and given to your editor about one week before the final deadline, and absolutely no later than 4 days before the deadline for final submission (to me).
• The primary responsibility of the editor is to correct any obvious errors in grammar or usage, and to clarify passages that may be unclear in meaning. Generally, the editor should not challenge the contents or opinions of the reviewer.
• Reviews should be returned to their authors within 48-72 hours, so that the final copy may be prepared for submission to me.

Presentation and Grading of the Final Document

• Create a header for your review that is similar to the ones used in MLA Notes or any other professional journal reviews. At a minimum, the header must include the complete publication information, including the item's ISBN, notice of any series in which the item appears, and a brief physical description of the item. Again, see Notes or a similar journal for a model.
• Save your review as a WORD file or something compatible with WORD XP. RTF (and similar) files are acceptable, provided the formatting of your paper remains visible. Avoid any program that saves files in a compressed or altered format.
• Submit your review to me as an electronic attachment to an email.
• The acceptable minimum length of this review (not counting the header or your signature) is 750 words, and the maximum is 1500 words. Again, do not include footnotes in the review.
• Grading of the review itself will be split between formatting and the physical presentation of the review, i.e., the formatting within the WORD file (20%), basic writing, i.e., grammar, spelling, etc. (30%) and the content of your review (50%).
• The overall grade for this review counts for 10% our your course grade.
• The review is due to me by 5:00 pm on Wednesday, 23 November 2011.