Movie Madness, Read This, or Listen to the Music
For this unit, you will write a movie, book, or music review for a publication. Collect a variety of reviews out of the publication for which you have chosen to write so that you'll have a good sense as to how these critics write for their audience and forum.
Also make sure that your forum would accept the type of review you're writing. For instance, some publications publish movie reviews but don't publish music reviews. Some publish all. Also consider the purpose of a movie review and why some people read them. That is, I read reviews to see if it might be a movie I want to see; others read reviews to see if they agree with the critic. Your goal is to provide a smart, informative, and critical analysis of the text you are reviewing. Some summary will necessarily be involved, but remember, this is a review, not a report. Whatever you ultimately review, you'll need to be extremely familiar with that text.
A word of caution. If you write a book or movie review, don't give away the ending!
The paper should be 5 to 7 double-spaced pages in length with one-inch margins.
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For the instructor. In order to prepare students for this assignment, you might want to have them:
Write a rhetorical analysis of one or two published reviews.
Write a forum analysis and discuss the implied audience (African Americans, teenagers/young adults, older adults, etc.).