The Secret Language of Comics: Visual Thinking and Writing

Writing part one of my literacy narrative was a very eye-opening experience for me. I hadn’t thought too much about how reading and writing impacted my life because by now it has been integrated into my normal everyday life. Starting with the freewriting exercises made me recognize just how lengthy my journey with reading and writing has been. I’ve grown into an entirely new person because of this journey and by the end of my narrative I realized just how much change has occurred in my life. I used to despise writing, but maturing into the person I am today has made me understand the great value and strength it has given me. I grateful to be able to express my ideas and point of views because of writing and I cannot imagine a life without it. Reading has been a part of who I was since the very beginning and I think the sentence that a reader would identify as the most interesting would be when I state, “No matter what stress or issues I faced, I could always retreat into the pages of these imaginative worlds filled with love and happiness.” I believe anyone who has a connection with reading can recognize the truth in this statement in one way or another. This experience has once again demonstrated to me the importance and power of reading and writing. Up until this point I had overlooked both of these very influential activities, but now I see their value once again and can fully appreciate their significance in the world.

https://bellanash19.wordpress.com/my-literacy-narrative-d/

In my narrative, I talk about how I went from a unmotivated writer to someone who loves to write. This happened in my junior year of high school when my teacher gave us an open ended assignment which barely had a rubric.

During this process, I learned that it was much harder to setup a page than I thought. For my creative medium for the narrative, I recorded myself reading the story that I wrote in junior year. I spent about two hours figuring out how to add it properly because whenever I put the file in the page, it gave me the message of “audio file not supported for security reasons”. I ended up finding out that one has to pay in order to add audio files to a word press page, so I just made a cute little photo that goes along with my story.

Writing the narrative itself was relatively easy. The moment I describe in my story happened relatively recently, so I could recount some of the more intricate details more vividly. In relation to the free writing activity before hand, this was easier. During the activity, I spent more time stressing out about the five minute time limit than actually writing. When I was alone writing in my room, I was calm, collected, and had my creative juices flowing. The transition from free write to narrative was simple because in one of my free writes, I wrote about the same topic that I tackled in my narrative- I just expanded on that story.

I learned that it can be hard to tell your own story. Even though the details were there in my mind, putting words that I wanted to say on the page was pretty hard. I was suprised that it took me so long; the actual writing process took me about an hour and a half.

The most interesting sentence in my opinion would have to be “I would think to myself, ‘why work harder if you’re already meeting your expectations?’ ” This is because I think a lot of people have this outlook on life whereas many people totally disagree. Lots of my friends this year told me that they would be disappointed with anything below straight A’s which in my opinion is a recipe for sadness. I know my outlook as a junior inst the most motivational, but it definitely kept me grounded as a person.

This week I uploaded my Literacy Narrative Assignment. Writing this narrative was enjoyable because it allowed me to revisit some of my past memories related to reading and writing. Prior to writing this, I answered the free writing prompts. I found writing these prompts to be easier than writing the final essay because I simply had to write stories about experiences. I was surprised by how vividly I could remember some of these events, especially since some of them occurred more than a decade ago. When I put the narrative together, I had some difficulty deciding on which details to include. Additionally, some of the topics that I wrote about during the free writing were unrelated to each other, so it was difficult to decide where to write what. I think an outside reader would find this line from my post to be the most intriguing: “Without my immersion into reading and writing, I would have never considered alternatives to science.” This line reveals how reading and writing changed my perspective, interests, and future goals. https://9shivanik9.wordpress.com/literacy-narrative/