Category: Student Posts

Revised Literacy Narrative found here.

In this project, I was able to create and tell a story digitally, visually, and alphabetically. These various modes each came with their own intricacies that I needed to accommodate for. Because of this, the beauty of each mode is able to be shown as one notices the comparisons and contrasts between them. Critical thinking was also an important aspect as I thought about what I wanted to truly say and formed that into cohesive text. This critical thinking process allowed me to turn what at first looked like nothing to me, into a full essay that is able to describe my experiences throughout my life. Additionally, this project has further proven that writing is a process as I was able to revise, get feedback, and make changes to continually better my work. In both the comic and the alphabetic texts, the importance of drafts and constant revision were shown through the results of peer editing and discussions with our teacher.

After creating my comic, it felt like I had a clearer view of what I wanted to say in my alphabetic text. Turning my literacy narrative into a comic forced me to ponder what specifically had an impact on my reading and writing habits and placed more graphic images in my mind of what those experiences were as I illustrated them in my work. In my original draft, it seemed like I was very general and vague in explaining what those experiences were so once revisiting it, I knew that I had to explain them in a manner that was vivid and clear in order to create a successful comic. I was able to focus in on the reasoning behind why my reading and writing habits developed the way they did as I looked at my past with an fixed objective in mind rather than simply looking for a general outlook of it.

As I revised my narrative, the story that I wished to tell was already somewhat clear to me in my mind. I wanted to focus mainly on how my experiences in a different country had the largest impact on my reading and writing. In contrast to the first time when I was writing, I had specific points that I wanted to pinpoint and then further explain and this is changed the way I viewed my story. Now, my story clearly conveys what my biggest influences were and particularly how they influenced me.

This week I submitted my final Literacy Narrative in which I discussed key experiences in my life that shaped the way I read and I write. This is a reflection on that assignment.

1. How has the entire literacy narrative project helped you to meet the Learning Outcomes for this class?

• Rhetorical Composition: 
  • Through preparing a literacy narrative in multiple forms of writing (alphabetic text and comic form), I was able to better understand how to express myself in a way that is clear to my audience. In each step of the literacy narrative, I grew more and more focused. In part 1, I wrote about 4 or 5 different events, in part 2, I depicted only 3 major events, and in part 3 I spent time delving into 2 major events in order to form a coherent argument.
• Critical Thinking and Reading Resulting in Writing
  • After creating part 2 of this assignment, I had the unique opportunity to receive feedback from my peers in class. I incorporated many of their suggestions into my revision while maintaining my original thought.
• Writing as Process
  • In many of my high school classes, I would work on class essays in one format. Although I would spend a lot of time on them, I now feel that I could improve upon them. That is because this class has taught me the importance of writing in different forms. Turning the literacy narrative into a comic before my writing my final version helped me think in ways that I otherwise would not have. Turning my alphabetic text into a comic helped me identify the most important parts of the story and explain what I previously did not realize that I needed to explain. 
• Visual Thinking
  • I enjoyed assembling my own visual representation of my literacy narrative for part 2 of the assignment. It was interesting to already have an alphabetic version of the comic prepared before creating it. I was surprised by how different my visual representation was from my alphabetic text. 

2. How was it to return to the alphabetic literacy narrative after having created your comic? How did you think differently after having worked in the visual medium and now returning to a text narrative?

• After working in the digital medium, I gained a greater sense of what the importance of my story is. Once I realized that it was ok to stray away from explaining events in depth and instead focusing on how the events affected me, my literacy narrative improved significantly. Turning this essay into a comic allowed me to see what my reader would be imagining and helped me create a more compelling story. 

3. How do you see the story you are trying to tell in different terms now? Was your analytical thinking process any different?3. 

• The story began as a journey through all of my experiences as a reader and writer. In a sense, it was a written-out version of a timeline. After turning it into a comic, it became more of a bildungsroman focused on one main event and the aftermath of that event.

Having created a comic before returning to my alphabetic narrative was truly helpful. There are two major changes in my Literacy Narrative Part 3 essay, both inspired by my comic. First, I was able to use more vivid language in the new version to make my narrative more engaging. Although this seems to be the trend of all revising process, having converted the text narrative in the form of a visual medium beforehand definitely makes the revision on language easier. For example, in my original version of the essay, I wrote, “whenever I felt like letting my thought fly away, it always ended up hitting the walls they built.” When visualizing this part of the narrative through comic, I chose to depict a bird locked up in a cage to symbolize my helplessness in that situation. This image, then, surprisingly inspired me to reframe the sentence in a more engaging way: “whenever my thoughts struggled to break free from the iron chains, hopping and flapping desperately to find a way out, they always ended up hitting the towering walls of rules, wounded.” In conclusion, the comic allowed me to actually envision my narrative and through the imagery, I was able to further polish my wording. The other major revision is on the overall content of my narrative. During the peer review process, I realized that each of my peers gave very different interpretations of the theme of my narrative, which led me to reflect on how to make my theme clearer in the upcoming revision. Reading over my comic again, I found that I needed to emphasize more on my discovery of the power of combining visuals and written texts,  which is the intended overarching theme of both my essay and comic. Therefore, I went back to my alphabetic text and strengthened this idea through reframing sentences for emphasis. I also noticed that the second part of my original essay was a bit unrelated to my theme, so in my revised version, I focus more on portraying how I learnt to incorporate images and words to overcome difficulties I met when reading and writing. It really surprised me that viewing visual mediums like comics seemed to be a quite “sensory” process, yet it actually contributed to the overall logic and structure of my text narrative.

The literacy narrative assignment undoubtedly helped me meet several aspects of the learning outcomes of this course. Having revised the essay three times (including the comic creation process), I learnt that writing is an ongoing process that every time we go back to the text, something new would come up and be changed. The repeated editing is, indeed, the indispensable process of creating a successful and thought-through essay. Moreover, as aforementioned, I was inspired by visual elements to polish the language and identity tensions of my narrative. And this process of jumping back and forth between visuals and alphabetic text and generating new ideas from it is exactly the demonstration of visual thinking strategies.