Paige Tigner
Professor Rinke
Writing 150
12 October 2012
Process
Memo
Writing about literacy is a task that I was not expecting
to encounter when I did. This process forced my brain to think back to how I
became able to think, read and write the way I am right now: its one big
connecting circle. The personal timeline I created was all so revealing in how
I came to be who I am today; never before had I realized how big of an impact
my road to literacy had on me. I began to notice a majority of my literacy experiences
being revolved around some sort of art, coming to this conclusion was not
something that I expected, yet it made sense to me. I knew that coloring,
painting, and drawing were regular day to day tasks for me as a child, but I
never realized that those early on experiences linked me to my literate
abilities today. The timeline surprisingly presented me with the specific
examples of my childhood I needed to connect the dots and told me that
creativity and visual learning is a big part of how I am the student/person I
am.
Beginning the literacy narrative was a pretty
straightforward shot for me. I had very little trouble choosing the focus areas
of my paper, and deciding how to organize everything. My usually strategies of
writing involve making brief notes of all my ideas on a sheet of paper in a way
that makes them all flow together nicely, this helps all my ideas pour out as I
write the next draft. Even more so I luckily had a very clear memory between my
coloring book and the words at the end of the page, which made it easy for me
to write about how art is what started it all. After that I was able to simply
elaborate on that specific memory with other experiences with art and books I
had in life. Once the rough draft was completed, it went through the peer
review process in class which helped me determine whether or not my theme was
presented in a clear enough way, and if it was understandable to other people.
My partners were able to fix minor grammatical errors, and told me when some of
my sentences were misleading and confusing. When examining my narrative for the
final time, I made note of the sentences that my peer review partners suggested
I use for my video, and I also made sure to alter some that I thought should be
in there to keep the train of thought on its path. I used roughly ten sentences
that were chosen by my partners and then I chose five or six more to use.
Writing these sentences made the story a dual-purpose type of writing and made me
think harder about the way I organized the paper, and the words I chose to
convey my main ideas.
Creating the animoto slideshow was somewhat difficult due
to the character limitations per slide. I ran into a few slides that were not
able to include every word I had in the original sentence. To work around this,
I substituted some of my main words with less lengthy words, and eliminated
words like “it”, “the”, “a”, and “to” when I could. In one slide in particular
I wrote “illustrations in books are my top memories of reading”, I was unhappy
with the end result of this slide, the words I had to use are not my first
choice-I would much rather have said “illustrations in my childhood books are
what I remember most”. The animoto forced me to compromise some original ideas
and create new ways to convey them. I think the pictures I chose are a mix of
being complimentary to my text slides, and providing more detail that I wasn’t
able to put into text. Some complimentary ones in my video include pictures of
me coloring as a child to go with “coloring books gave me a strong connection
with paper”, the picture of crayons compliment “markers and crayons were the
coolest toys I had”. Some other pictures such as the pictures I included of The Berenstein Bears book, The Series of Unfortunate Events, and The Spiderwick Chronicles all provided
details about what types of books I found interest in, and how they got more
advanced over time. Along with all of these pictures, I included many other
personal pictures of myself reading with family, and partaking in art
competitions and sketching in the park with friends. All of these personal
pictures helped set the tone for my video and let the audience see first-hand
how art and reading has been in my life. The audio I chose for my video is A Message by Coldplay. I would describe
this song as very calm, easy-going, and natural which is how I feel about my
road to literacy. I chose that song because I think it appropriately
exemplifies the success I was lucky enough to have in becoming literate. Not
only does it compliment my video in a thematic way, but it also has that
continuous, easy strum of the guitar throughout the song that matches the
background of my video that looks like bleeding ink. Overall, I am happy with the way my animoto
turned out; however, there are a few things I would change or improve if I
could. Reflecting on the responses I got, I would consider slowing down the speed
of my video so the audience has an easier time following the ideas I present,
and I would also like to add more text slides that focus in on how I think art
and my literate abilities are connected so that my audience can understand more
of the reasoning behind all of that.
