Essay 1: What is “a cassette world” and are we living in it? 

First Draft: February 9 (in-class)

Revision for Credit: February 21 (to Bb)

Required for all students. In this assignment, you’ll listen to, digitally annotate, verbally discuss, and respond informally in writing to three (3) episodes of the podcast Mixtape: “Dakou,” “Jack and Bing,” and “Cassetternet”. In your essay, you’ll adopt a two-part stance. First, you’ll define from the reading what makes up what host Simon Adler argues is a ‘cassette world.’ Then, drawing on Mixtape, reliable research sources from the open internet and from the Lehman library, and from human beings you might know who lived through the early part of the cassette era, you’ll argue about whether or not Adler is right. In other words, to borrow the language of our course objectives: “Through close reading, annotation, discussion, research, and drafting, you’ll compose a clearly defined claim.” In addition, after a lot of drafting and editing, we’ll prepare this essay for submission on Blackboard. At that point, you’ll also learn how to adhere to the formatting and documenting conventions of the discipline of English. If you have a declared major that uses other conventions, I invite you to share what those formatting and citation conventions are and get used to them.