Blog Post 1: September 3

The sequence of these three articles really helped my understanding of how to approach and read a scholarly article. In the past I have always found myself confused and easily distracted when it comes to trying to digest the information within a scholarly writing. I feel like after this exercise I am now more prepared to read scholarly articles in the future.

"It's Not Harry Potter" really made me think about the context in which scholarly publications should be approached. I have always known that scholarly articles are written for a specific audience but it has never really registered that I need multiple reading strategies for an article of that nature. Typically I just sit down and try to read it, which honestly does not usually end well. I found the list of strategies the author provided to be very helpful. Some of them, like skimming and moving on, I was a little surprised to see. When I am trying to understand something I don't usually see skimming as a good strategy. I do like, however, that he recommends small doses and at the end coming back to the purpose. Those seem to be very helpful in trying to understand something that is so information heavy.

I used "How to Read a Scholarly Article" and "It's Not How Much, It's How" in tandem. After reading "How to Read a Scholarly Article" I tried to implement the suggested techniques while reading "It's Not How Much, It's How." I found that this helped out my understanding a lot. I felt like I knew what I was looking for after reading the discussion and conclusion first. This definitely helped as I read through the main body of the article. I then went back and read the whole article again, this time in the correct order. When I was finished I had a full understanding of the information in the article.

I have been struggling to come up with a composer that I really want to use for the 2nd annotated bibliography. One of the ideas that I have come up with is John Mackey. John has written numerous works for band as well as orchestra in recent years and is still somewhat early in his career. The only problem I have with doing this project on John is that I don't know how much has been published about him. He is very active online and on social media but other than that I don't know what else is out there. I am very familiar with most of his music, I have had the privilege of playing a lot of it as well as working with him a couple of different times. I already know that he attended Berkley school of music in Boston and that he loves to take pictures of food. Another one that I have thought of is Chris Potter. Chris is a jazz saxophonist who has been very influential on the jazz scene. I am familiar with only a handful of his works and really do not know much about him besides his music. Chris would definitely be interesting to learn about, especially since I am a saxophone player myself, and I'm sure I could easily find sources relating to him. He would be a good choice, but I definitely want to do some more research before making a final selection.