Welcome to Jacey’s Jams

Memo

This electronic portfolio comprises of three writing projects about some of my favorite music artists. The first, “From Homeless to Forbes List” is an annotated playlist covering some of my favorite songs by The Weeknd. In it, I track his personal life and relate it to the growth he makes as an artist through each album. This is one WP I chose to revise because, as the first one, I think it had the most room for technical improvements. I embedded links to the articles where quotes were written rather than academically citing them. This helps the piece feel more natural and less professional. Also, I noticed that some sentences were choppy or run-on, so I restructured them—allowing for an easier read.

In the second WP, “Through the Badlands,” we were asked to consider the question: if you were stranded on a desert island, which album would you choose to take with you? I chose Halsey’s album, Badlands. In this project, I relay the struggles Halsey has gone through and how they relate to my own. Badlands is the most important album to me because it’s helped me through both the highs and lows of my life. This is the second piece I chose to revise because of the feedback I received that the paragraphs were too long. I reread the piece and created more paragraph breaks, separating them where the emphasis changed. I found repeated words, so I created a greater vocabulary and made more grammatical/structural changes. These changes will help the reader move quicker through the piece and not notice redundancy.

Lastly, “Red Rocks Turned Temple” is a concert review of Alison Wonderland’s magnificent show at Red Rocks Amphitheatre. In this article, I aim to relay the perfect balance she created between an extravagant electronic dance music performance and her personal emotion and humility.  

Music is very important to me. Being an emotional person, I’m particularly thankful for music because it always comforts, inspires, and understands me. Writing about music was a very different experience for me as I usually only write business reports and academic research papers. In this portfolio, I was able to write honestly about my thoughts and feelings of the music as well as the personal connection I have to it. I hope that readers can feel my deep appreciation for the music as well as my inspiration in writing about it. Furthermore, I hope that people who feel the same way as me, though reading my blog, either find new music that can help them or listen to the same music in a different, deeper way than before.

This ASEM course, particularly the writing in this portfolio, allowed me to have fun while writing. I realized I truly enjoy writing about things I’m passionate about—music being one of them—therefore, writing is always available as a career choice or hobby. In the future, I will aim to write more for fun and personal growth and read more music writing since I enjoy the subject so much. I will look to professional writing for an opportunity to learn more about a music piece, but not to absorb a given opinion about it.

Music is special in that it’s a personal interpretation but also a collective experience. We can listen to a song crying in our room alone and go to that concert to cry over the same song with thousands of strangers. I believe music connects people in ways nothing else can; for example, I’ve met countless of friends at concerts. We don’t know each other beforehand, but by coming to enjoy the same music, we vibe and realize we have much in common. Many people, including myself, listen to music constantly throughout their every-day life. Therefore, it can play an influential role in society, initiating or encouraging either positive or negative social trends that travel between the people who talk about music. Writing about such music has the same effect. An article can influence thousands of readers as well as the thousands those people talk to about it. It can anger people or, hopefully more likely, help people as they find new music that becomes meaningful to them. That is all I hope to accomplish in my portfolio. I wrote about the music I love the most and why that is. I want other people to know about these artists and how spectacular both their music and live shows are. So please, click the blog posts below or menu icon in the top right to dive in….

View all posts

Follow My Blog

Get new content delivered directly to your inbox.