Commentary on ‘Foo Fighters Music Review’ and ‘The Birth of a Band, Waring Green’
My aim in writing these pieces were both to inform and put across my opinions to an audience of interested readers. For the music review my intended audience was young music lovers and for the biography it was more for anyone who is interested in reading about people who have had an interesting life experience, perhaps a similar one to themselves. I wanted my pieces to be clear and amusing, and in the music review, more informal so that it would appeal to people. The biography was intended to be informative, whereas the review was intended to be more open in view as to include the audience more.
In order to accomplish this I have deliberately used a number of techniques. In the title of my second production piece I have included some alliteration of the sound which catches the attention of the reader and helps to establish the main story.
In ‘The Birth of a Band’ I used mainly first person pronouns such as ‘my’ and ‘I’. This helps to show the reader that it is from my own personal view and it is an actual real life even that I have encountered.
In the Foo Fighter review I used mainly third person pronouns such as ‘their’, and I also named people and attached the event directly to their name. this is the opposite of the other piece as it establishes that the music and the credit belongs to them and no-one else.
I have tried to be quite informal in both of my pieces by using words such as ‘dodgy’ and constructions such as ‘Pointless? Funny!’ This helps to make the reader feel more at ease when reading it, and there is also some intended humour in order to make the reader laugh, more so in the review than the biography piece.
In the review of the Foo Fighters I included one instance of a mild taboo lexeme. ‘…damn good…’ Again this is a point in the text that gives the reader a bit of comic relief and a chance to reflect on my opinions with their own. This is why I decided to add quite a lot of interrogatives into the text, even though I cannot expect an answer, the reader can establish their own views and opinions about what I think and also about what they think in comparison.
I aimed to make my two pieces as clear as I possibly could. I used a number of techniques to ensure this. Firstly I used short strings of words, for example, ‘That was a real boost’, and tried to avoid overly long sentences. I didn’t want my readers to become bored of reading too many facts or opinions at a time. Secondly I used fairly short simple lexemes. I tried to keep my words either monosyllabic or disyllabic because this makes the text flow more smoothly and doesn’t make the reader get confused at long complicated words.
In my two pieces I have used a lot of past tense, mainly in ‘The Birth of a Band’ to show how what we have achieved is a past event. For example ‘was’ and ‘asked’. However I did use some present progressive, ‘will keep trying’ in order to show how our band and music are still going. I also used some present tense, mainly in the Foo Fighters Music review, to show how their music is still in development. It also helps to convey how it is their most recent album, as I am talking about it in the ‘here and now’.
I included in my review of the Foo Fighters music an overall grade of how I feel about their music. This is nine out of ten. Most people will understand this as a good mark because it is on a scale of one to ten which is the most common way of grading something. I feel it is a good way of rounding up my review, although I do think it could lead to the reader skipping the rest of the text and just taking the score at face value rather than investigating further into why I have given this grade. But if the reader is interested enough I do not see this as a major problem.
I believe I have successfully achieved my targets in writing these pieces. I feel as though they are very entertaining and they convey my feelings and opinions towards the subject matter very effectively. I feel that the information I have provided is sound and believable.
