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The entire literacy narrative project helped me view my writing as an ever-evolving process. The process of writing, drawing, and writing again necessitated re-imagining my narrative with every new rendering. Thus, I was given the opportunity to develop my original idea more than I originally thought was possible. Returning to the alphabet narrative from having created a comic was much easier than writing from scratch. Drawing the comic after the original alphabet essay added more depth and meaning to my essay that I could pull from for the redraft. My narrative began as what I thought was a story about my anxieties around English. Upon revisiting, I realized just how superficial my first draft was – how it failed to address its subtext strongly enough to be clearly understood and deeply felt. My hesitance and need to convey a story clearly struck a balance in my comic; I could represent what was hard to say without using words, and I could spell out the ideas that would guide interpreting my illustrations. In the draft of my alphabetic narrative I took all the ideas from both drawings and text to tell my story again, this time with a bolder voice. For my literacy narrative, the three parts were practice in exacting and amplifying my writing voice, riding it of fear of saying exactly what I want to say.

The process of creating all three literacy narratives touched on all of the learning outcomes. I accessed the rhetorical composition learning outcome by writing visually and alphabetically. After each narrative was published, I had to think critically about how to improve and focus my story. My narrative is about recognizing writing as a process. By posting three different versions, each with reflections, the project has added six pages to my digital identity. The most meaningful learning outcome I met was in visual thinking. Thinking visually–somewhat ironically–completely changed how I view my writing and thinking process. After writing my first literacy narrative, I had some ideas for what needed improvement and tried to revise the essay before I would have to draw it in comic form. While editing it to shift the focus slightly from outside approval to asking for help, I got stuck and didn’t know what to do. This forced me to map out my comic in a set of bullet points based on what would be the most important aspects to visualize. In doing this, I realized I had missed two key elements that would eventually tie my new theme together. After completing the comic form of my literacy narrative, editing the alphabetic text was by far easier. I was skeptical that drawing out my narrative would have any noticeable impact on my story, but in fact, it was a tremendous help. Thinking visually is a new and helpful tool I can now rely on to focus my work when I get lost in the revision process.  

Reflection

This was an experience that I had less than a week before creating my comic. I had been very conflicted after this experience and wanted to reveal the story in a visual way. I had told this story to a few of my friends then realized that it would be a great idea to make my comic about this. Before drawing the comic, I made a rough draft. I drew out the panels for the first three pages. I had a lot of difficulty deciding what to do with the fourth page of this comic, so I started with the fifth page. For the fifth page, I wrote out a brief description of what I wanted to do with each panel. Then, after much deliberation, I decided to utilize the fourth page as a way to express my conflicted feelings rather than simply depicting the events exactly as they happened.